And on the subject of fandom because a bee has made a permanent home in my bonnet over this nonsense—
I’m not saying that people aren’t allowed to be uncomfortable with certain content, because you are. Or that you’re not allowed to be critical of certain content, because you can be.
But there is a major disconnect between what actual media criticism is/should be and what is going on in fandom (particularly tumblr fandom) lately. Media criticism means actually looking at the media in question and asking what it means, where it came from, why the author may have written it, what message it sends, and discussing different interpretations to all of these questions. It is, and should be, thoughtful with understanding the media and why it was written and why it is being read being the main goal.
Telling authors to kill themselves is not media criticism. Lying and distorting reality and provable facts about how media affects reality is not media criticism. Running hate blogs and harassment campaigns are not media criticism. It’s cyberbullying.
What’s going on in fandom is, very clearly to me, not about understanding media or trends in media or understanding other people and certainly not about protecting anyone much less abuse survivors. It’s about hurting other people in order to feel better about yourself, holding up attacks on fictional content and the people who consume it as the Ultimate Pinnacle of Social Justice, and being as horrible as you can to people who ship the ‘wrong things’ in order to get as many Woke Points as possible. It’s about how absolutely telling it is that the targets of these attacks are almost always fan creators and little known original content creators rather than popular published authors who create the exact same kind of content and the absolute hypocrisy in the people who are take part in this culture which is shown from the fact that they can easily say “fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum uwu” but make no mention of the fact that neither does their suicide-baiting to the fact that there are multiple examples of these people not practicing what they preach (see: anti/s who are now getting into the Devilman fandom which is a media where a teenager is literally shipped with the actual devil and contains every kind of Problematic thing you can name, anti/s who are against ~toxic~ ships like re/ylo while they themselves ship things like ky/lux, anti/s who love to go on and on about how fanfic normalizes abuse but can’t comprehend that creating an entire culture of cyberbullying is much more likely to do that, etc etc etc).
It’s all just toxic and incredibly performative and, ultimately, useless as it offers absolutely no value or anything of any worth to fandom or the world.
Not supporting that should not be controversial. Statements like “real people are more important than fictional characters” and “telling people to kill themselves over the fanfic they read is a bad thing to do” should not be controversial. CSA survivors saying “someone shipping two adult cartoon characters isn’t as bad as what happened to me” should not be controversial, should not get them branded as being pedophiles themselves or pedophile apologists.
And yet, here we are.
The entire ant/i movement in fandom is not about protecting abuse survivors, it is not about protecting people from content they find triggering, it has no goal to it whatsoever other than to hurt as many people as possible because hurting people is the Cool New Trend to take part in and doing it under the (very thin) guise of “uwu we just want to protect people from pedophiles” allows them to tell themselves that what they’re doing is okay while making people who haven’t taken more than 2 minutes to look into this diskorse think that it’s a legit movement (nevermind the fact that in ant/i speak a “pedophile” is rarely ever actually a pedophile and can be anything from a person who ships a 25 year old character with a 30 year old to someone who ships two adult characters with a height different to a 15 year old fan who ships characters who are their own age). It’s a cesspit built on horrible critical thinking skills, a denial of actual provable facts (see: ~fiction has a 1:1 efect on reality~ which has been disproved, constantly, just go ask Tipper Gore), and people who are incapable/unwilling to have a genuine debate over any of the topics frequently brought up in this diskorse because reasonable conversation just doesn’t give them that Self-Righteous High the way that sending 100 messages to someone telling them to pee themselves does.
It isn’t about social justice. It isn’t about media criticism. It isn’t about listening to abuse survivors as anti/s frequently ignore any abuse survivor who doesn’t completely agree with them. It’s about cyberbullying and using these things as a mask to justify it. The people who take part in it are no different than the children in middle school who bully other kids in the halls, except that ant/is would never try to bully anyone in real life because then they might actually have to face consequences for their behavior.
The longer this goes on and the more ‘discourse’ I see, the more I get the same impression.
UchihaSavior 