[ SECRET POST #6476 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6476 ⌋

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


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.
[Mass Effect]



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.



__________________________________________________



07.















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 39 secrets from Secret Submission Post #926.
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]

05. https://i.imgur.com/8KAxuFN.png

[(Anonymous)]

acab

[(Anonymous)]

You are a child.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you saying all children are bastards? Dude, that is harsh.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

lmao
you are so right tho, ACAB!

[(Anonymous)]

IA basically but it's just not worth arguing with people over.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

this is exactly why this is a secret haha

[(Anonymous)]

I'm starting to think my only favorite cops are the fictional kind, so... yeah. I don't need the reminder; I'm well aware how much they suck in real life.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

Right? I am very aware irl cops are bad.

[philstar22]

The thing is, making fictional cops awesome people, or flawed people whose flaws aren't called out even though they are exactly what real cops do that is bad (like attacking suspects for example) is a problem. It is part of the normalizing of bad cop behavior generally as a society.

That being said, I do sometimes like cop shows, and I don't think that is wrong. But I also don't think it is wrong to call out how our media in general romanticizes cops and helps the whitewashing of how bad they actually are in real life.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

the commenter below summed it up refectly - it feels performative in fandom. we're already 80% women and leftists in here, we know ACAB. there's no need to include fictional characters in that imo.
copaganda is real, but if most of the people liking cop chars are already aware of that, what's the point? it's annoying.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but speaking as a white woman it took me a long time to really understand the scope of ACAB, even though I am also a leftist. I agree that people giving "friendly reminders" on fic does nothing, but I absolutely wouldn't assume that women and leftists are actually aware of ACAB.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's fair to say it's bad if it's something made before 2010 or so. ACAB and knowledge of the corruption in the police system wasn't something you could just expect people to know about. Especially if it's just a plot about say, the main character's house getting robbed. It would be nonsense for them not to call the police at all, and it would obstruct the plot to have the cop whose role is just a plot device who shows up to get evidence on the crime scene be a dick about Black people or something.

[philstar22]

Oh I agree. And I don't think even watching modern cop shows is wrong. I just think there should be a general acknowledgment that there is purposeful whitewashing going on. Some shows are worse than others (I refuse to watch Blue Bloods for this reason among others). But it does exist. Doesn't make watching the shows personally bad.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah the people who need to comment ACAB on everything related to cops in fiction are a nuisance. They’re doing more harm than good.

[(Anonymous)]

Hiiiiii, Fashie.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't say they're doing harm, like at all. It's just annoying and performative. They'd rather post ACAB in the comments of fanart made by leftists who are already critical of the police system, than try to talk to their dickhead family members who support "Blue Lives Matter" in real life.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure about this one, really. Reminding people that stuff in fiction isn't good IRL has a pretty broad spectrum. Like, someone going "remember kids: serial killers and murder are bad in real life!" is silly because duh, everybody realizes that. But someone going "hey, this relationship in real life would be abusive and coercive, don't idealize this for real" ... can be useful sometimes if e.g. a whole bunch of teenagers are saying they want this IRL and don't realize e.g. this isn't how Actual BDSM works, wtf.

Where do "remember real cops are bad" fall in this? Idk, somewhere in the middle? There's a whole lot of people who realize what you do, OP, and a whole lot of people who don't and are preaching "just a few bad apples" everywhere. I don't think it's always useless to point out something is copaganda when it is, if the context is in a place where people seem to believe its real and reflective of reality. FS isn't one of those places, but they do exist.

[(Anonymous)]

While your point is technically a good one, I almost never see people offering up those reminders of "what's hot/cool in fiction would be problematic in real-life" to people who are genuinely claiming to want those things IRL. It's only ever uninvited, unsolicited "friendly reminder :)" bullshit on fic or art or other posts that are clearly only referring to the specific in-universe fictional thing.

[(Anonymous)]

ACAB

Either because they look the other way and don't speak up or they're doing the dirt themselves.

As for fictional cops? The only ones I like are the Brooklyn 99 and White Boy Carl. If you'll excuse my choice of phrasing, Lenny Briscoe gets grandfathered in. The rest are, at best, on the low end of corrupt or The Shield. But if fiction is meant for anything, it's to imagine something better than we have in reality, so I have no issue with fiction creating police who aren't bastards.

Gotta admit leaving comments about ACAB is obnoxious. And I don't think writers should feel the need to warn about having police in their stories, either. Unless they want to, I guess.

[(Anonymous)]

Biiiiiiiig CSI fan here. That being said, one thing I've noticed a lot in it and shows like it:
One of Our Heroes has a mentor/old buddy who turns out to be a killer/racist/child molester/something else bad and they find out about it so they can have an emotional crisis and turn them in.

[(Anonymous)]

I have watched and currently watch shows with cops as main characters depicted as the 'good guys' in them and I do often root for them in the show. However, I am struggling to think of one show where a 'good guy' cop hasn't done something legally or morally questionable while on the job. And I gotta say, since the audience is supposed to be rooting for them and they very often get away with little to no consequences for doing things that are flat out wrong, I can kind of see why there are people that want to call out every fictional cop.

You're right, it is copaganda and it seems it might have worked on you. Are they really good people if they use their jobs as a means to harass, threaten, intimidate, and/or traumatize suspects and witnesses? Are they really good people when they violate others' rights and the law to catch someone? And even if you conclude that they still are good people, those things would, in my eyes, make for bad cops.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

>I am struggling to think of one show where a 'good guy' cop hasn't done something legally or morally questionable while on the job

I will give the two examples from the top of my head, only one of them is my fandom lol:
Resident Evil
Haikyuu!!

[(Anonymous)]

aMe too - though tbf I don't know either of the fandom other anon mentioned (haikyuu is about cops??? I thought it was sports manga...)

I've liked quite a bit of media about cops but I can't think of any of them who haven't done something illegal, immoral, downright evil, or just very asshole-y on the job. Even Andy Griffith! A lot of times the media frame it so it's absolutely justified or it is the "good guy" thing to do... but if you try to look at it outside that lens they're absolute bastards. Yeah, you shot that guy you knew for a fact was going to firebomb a schoolbus full of nuns and there was absolutely no other way to stop him... but in the real world you don't have writers setting you up so that you were 100% sure he was actually going to do it and there was 100% no other way out, in the real world you just shot a guy based on suspicion and pretty flimsy evidence and then you had to be a person who could live with that.

It's a combination of that kind of thing being totally normalized, and that our stories just aren't ready for cops who mostly spend their days doing incredibly boring but emotionally draining shit... and that part of a job of a cop is to be a bastard. Like that's what cops, even in an ideal world, are for: they're meant to specialize in intervening in situations where you need someone on your side who knows how to be a bastard in safe and useful way. Even a "good cop" is going to spend a lot of time doing things like forcibly objecting a vulnerable person having an emotional crisis from a store because they wouldn't stop screaming profanities and threats of violence at the staff, and you've gotta be a little bit of a bastard to tell a person having the worst day of their life that they're now banned from the coffeeshop and you'll arrest them if they try to go back in.

Like, saying "ACAB" in every comment section is pointless wankery, but also, any cop media where the "good cops" aren't bastards and won't willingly admit they're bastards is either lying or doesn't know shit about cops.

[(Anonymous)]

Flashpoint was deliberately written with the cop characters as good people trying to do the right thing. Copaganda for sure but I did appreciate the effort to show characters trying to figure out the right thing and do it.