Tag: in defense of darkfic

cronagorgonzola:

samanddeaninpanties:

cronagorgonzola:

samanddeaninpanties:

friendly reminder that the ao3 comments section isn’t the place for fandom discourse

friendlier reminder that telling a writer they’re disgusting or you hope they get arrested because of what they’ve written isn’t an appropriate reaction and only makes you look bad

friendliest reminder that the back button exists and you could do everyone a favor and not say anything

Kay but there’s straight up child porn on ao3 so maybe f you can’t handle being called disgusting stop writing and publishing child porn

Like the first post on your blog is an incest ship so mayhaps you deserve all of the hate you get 🤔 just my personal onion tho

So what? It’s fiction. The characters I love literally don’t exist. Meanwhile antis harass REAL people with REAL feelings. It’s weird as hell, and, quite frankly, disturbing.

There are plenty of things that squick me out on ao3. But I behave in a mature manner and, you know, don’t read those topics. I also don’t wish bad on the writers who touch on things I’m not into. I don’t harass them, no matter how squicked or triggered I get. Because it’s the decent thing to do. I am in charge of my own consumption of fanfic. I can’t expect writers to hold my hand and take care of me. It’s up to me to take care of myself. Antis don’t seem to grasp these concepts and that’s unfortunate for them and everyone else.

And wow. You think people deserve harassment over fiction? That’s pretty sad. Seek professional help! 🙂

You’re getting off to incest you don’t have a moral high ground to stand on

Excuse me, but what the fuck? What the fuck is your problem dude? You and I both know there isn’t any child pornography on ao3. There is fiction of *fictional characters* on ao3 and some of them are underage, yes, but no real children are being harmed to create it. None of the stuff on ao3 is real. It’s all fictional. You don’t have to like it but it’s not real. Take solace in that fact. No one real person is suffering so like… maybe get over yourself? Moralizing isn’t gonna help anyone, bucko. 

Your own person feelings about a tv show or fictional incest or icky fiction aside, why do you think it’s okay to be mean to real people? Why do you think a person deserves hate because they like fictional things you don’t? Does being a bully on the internet make you feel like you’re accomplishing something? Because the only thing you accomplish is looking like a jackass. 

“Maybe you deserve it” what the hell kind of harassment apologism is that? I don’t even have the words to explain to you how wrong and screwed up that is. Good god, it’s so victim blame-y. Your personal opinion is bullshit. No one, and I mean NO ONE deserves harassment. Really, I wish you would think about the implication of what you’re saying and why it’s so messed up. “Someone who hasn’t broken any laws or hurt any real person did something I don’t like so they deserve to be treated like garbage” is what you’re saying. Like… how is that morally superior at all? How is that doing anyone any good? That causes real harm to a real person who you can talk to and interact with. In what universe is it justified to hurt a real person over fictional content? How can that possibly be a good thing? 

You and I both know it’s morally wrong to hurt a real person or to excuse the harm that comes to a real person just because you don’t like the kind of fiction they like, so maybe take a good long look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and re-evaluate. Don’t be so callous towards other people. 

freedom-of-fanfic:

‘why don’t antis just make their own archive if they hate AO3 so much?’

because fandom policers won’t feel safe enough if they just establish a safe space they control. they will only feel safe once every space is a ‘safe space’ they control. 

(wherein ‘safe space’ is ‘space that follows my social rules/makes me & my own feel safe’, not ‘a place where everyone present feels safe’.)

at heart, I think most fandom policers are afraid: afraid of being ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’.

afraid of exposure to new ideas.

afraid of facing the trauma of past experiences, and afraid of being hurt by new experiences. afraid to tolerate the worldviews of others; afraid to admit that more than one healthy way of reacting to the horrible things in this world exists. and fandom/fanworks are full of these things, because they come from such a diverse group of people.

the existence of anything outside their control means they could, at any moment, encounter something that makes them afraid – and being reminded that they are afraid makes them angry. but anger is a ‘bad’ emotion – unless it’s righteous anger, or justified anger. so: everything that makes them angry is a dangerous influence that must be destroyed. justification established. now it is their duty to make the world a space that’s ‘safe’ for them.

tl;dr policing fandom is an authoritarian social model, and authoritarianism is about assuaging fear by assuming absolute control.

unfortunately for them, it’s an impossible task. (unfortunately for us, it won’t stop them from trying.)

don’t donate to AO3 out of fear of antis; donate to AO3 because it’s proven a trustworthy archive that’s worth keeping running. and hey: did you know the number one way that authoritarians become less authoritarian is by experiencing the things they’re scared of? maybe keeping AO3 up will even help turn some of these folks around.

Muddied Waters

optimisticsprinkles:

How can you tell the difference between a story with deeply troubling opinions, themes, and character actions and a story where the writer is inserting his or her own views, opinions, and preferences?

Warning signs in a story:

  • Those with a certain point of view are written as strong, wise, reasonable, sensible, or normal.
  • Those with different or opposite views are written as weak, foolish, strange, wishy-washy, aggressive, or dysfunctional.
  • Limited ways of thinking. The “right” way and the “wrong” way.
  • No moderating voice of reason. Even those who should know better fail to be unbiased.
  • Unrealistic characters, character interactions, and authority figures.
  • World-building is not only unrealistic but also feeds into the “reasonable” character’s understanding of reality. Reality itself is warped to support a point of view.

NOT warning signs:

  • One or more character is dismissive, contemptuous, aggressive, or unhealthy in his/her point of view. (See: unreliable narrator)
  • Good characters all think the same way and badguys are clearly evil. (Good guys are good, bad guys are bad is very common and not typically cause for alarm.)
  • Characters taking sides. (This is normal human behavior. Even when the sides are unbalanced in someone’s favor, that is realistic. A 50/50 split is too contrived.)
  • World-building that creates a problematic world or a world where most people fall into a certain way of thinking. (Dystopian worlds and dysfunctional characters.)

Examples:

Yes, writers can make a point through story. Classic dystopian fiction like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and The Giver all make commentary on human nature and serve as warnings for how far society can fall if we let it. Unreliable narrator stories like The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye have less social commentary and more to do with tragic human nature on a limited and personal scale.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have simple stories of good versus evil where characters aren’t very well fleshed-out. Sometimes the good point of view is obviously the author’s idea of what good means, and the evil is evil for no reason, but that’s just failure to think through character motivations and create nuance.

It’s only when the fabric of reality in a story (the setting, the facts, the characters themselves) warps into something unrecognizable that you can be sure that the story you are reading is biased. This is most obvious in situations like “Pretty in Pink” where a character is a stereotype or farce of a people or culture. I recently read a story (not fanfiction) where modern culture was written as oppressive to straight men in a premise that was meant to be light-hearted but made any sane reader deeply uncomfortable. In that story, the LGBTQ+ community was sexually aggressive, wishy-washy, and foolish, as were any “progressive” thinkers, and the main character and his friends were the only “reasonable” people who saw problematic behavior as problematic. The establishment (such as police) supported the warped version of reality by treating straight men as guilty until proven innocent while they treated everyone else with kid gloves. That was a perfect example of a story which pushed its social views on the reader. (I would give you a link and a detailed analysis, but I have no wish to give that mess any web traffic.)

Conclusion:

Darkness in fiction is normal because darkness in human nature is normal. Racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, these are real things in our world, and so they make it into our fiction on a regular basis. Sometimes a writer condemns them through their story by making them part of the bad guy’s point of view or something for the main character to change in someone else to make that person “good,” but sometimes they are simply there to create setting, world, mood, and characterization. Because they are real things. And in realistic stories, no plucky heroine is going to undo a lifetime of negative social grooming by pointing out that that mindset is bad.

Every writer has different motivations for their writing. To entertain, to reveal, to find catharsis, to condemn, or to simply write. Reasons for writing are as widely varied as writers themselves.

Therefore, if you ever think a writer him- or herself thinks the way a character does, I require more than an accusation to believe it. Give clear and obvious proof through detailed literary analysis, or give the writer’s own unambiguous words, speaking as themselves.

Anything less is pure “fuck off” territory.

If you are anti-darkfic, you are anti-survivor

thedogsled:

frozen-delight:

shinelikethunder‌:

itsbuckybitch‌:

I’ve had a bee in my bonnet since this incident the other day, and I figure it’s probably time to get it out of my system.

Darkfic is not a new phenomenon. It’s as old as the hills. For as long as there have been fic writers, there have been fic writers using the medium to explore themes that are taboo in mainstream fiction. Torture and gore, death and destruction, rape and sexual abuse. Every author has their own motives and inspirations for the content they produce, and there’s no ‘average’ darkfic writer. But what I can tell you – anecdotally, from a full decade’s worth of experience drifting in and out of various darkfic communities – is that when you involve yourself with these authors, you start meeting survivors. Lots of survivors. In what I think it’s fair to call a statistically significant concentration. 

For some, their survivor status is incidental to their controversial interests; for others of us, past trauma and mental illness are intrinsically tied to what we read and write. Darkfic can be a lifeline, a validation, a liberation, a profound and unbeatably intense catharsis for the shit we’ve got stored in our heads. Darkfic enclaves within fandom are places where we can air our darkest and most desperate fears and fantasies in a safe, supportive environment, in the company of others who remind us that we are not broken or defective just for wanting the things we want.

And here’s the thing: literally no one in these communities wants to force outsiders to join us. We recognise that our content is stuff that the majority of people don’t want to see, and we do our best to protect the rest of fandom from involuntary exposure by using appropriate trigger warnings. We don’t want to hurt anyone, we don’t want to ruin anyone’s innocence – we just want to be left alone to do our thing. But tumblr callout culture has taught people that “speaking out” against things they don’t like is cool and brave and socially progressive. It has created an environment where virtually the automatic response to distress, discomfort or personal offense is to look for a perpetrator, a culpable oppressive villain to whom the offended party can deliver a vicious “smackdown” while their friends look on and cheer.

I’m not going to argue just now about whether that’s ever an acceptable way to treat people. Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings on callout culture as a whole, there’s an intersection between darkfic and trauma survivors that you guys all need to understand before you go targeting darkfic authors as convenient representatives of everything you think is wrong with the world. So let me lay this out as simply and clearly as I can:

  • When you oppose darkfic because it “harms survivors”, you are talking directly over large crowds of survivors who will tell you they find darkfic to be a validating, healing experience.
  • When you claim that darkfic is self-destructive and unhealthy, you are privileging your personal beliefs over the lived experience of other people.
  • When you accuse darkfic authors of glorifying and supporting real-life abuse, you accuse survivors of glorifying and supporting their own abusers.
  • When you blame darkfic for supporting rape culture, you are making victims responsible for the actions of their oppressors.
  • When you set conditions around the creation and enjoyment of darkfic – aka “it’s only okay if you’re a survivor” – you create a culture of coercive disclosure, where survivors are expected to trade their right to privacy for the right to live free of harassment.
  • When you criticise darkfic authors for using survivor status as an “excuse”, you are locking us out of our own communities and denying our past traumas for the sake of a political argument.

If you are anti-darkfic, you are anti-survivor. I’m sick and tired of watching vulnerable members of my community get harassed and bullied by people who claim to be acting in the interests of survivors. I’m sick of being told that survivors like me aren’t survivors at all, that our very existence is toxic and harmful, that we have no right to speak and be heard on an issue that affects us so intimately. 

Anti-darkfic fans, you need to pull back. You need to realise that your comfort and safety, while important, are not more important than the comfort and safety of other people. You need to understand that it is your responsibility to learn how to peacefully coexist alongside people who experience the world differently from you, even if their experiences make you unhappy or uncomfortable. You have no right to ask us to stop existing so that you can feel at ease. You have no right to demand that we prioritise the needs of some survivors over others. You don’t own fandom, and you have no right to dictate who does or doesn’t get to participate.

You are not brave heroes speaking out against the spread of moral degeneracy in fandom. You are bullies, deliberately and systematically targeting trauma survivors with your abusive tactics. It really is that simple. And it needs to stop.

WELL FUCKING PUT.

Addendum: coercive disclosure is not the only reason it’s a terrible idea to draw a line in the sand between survivors and non-survivors liking darkfic. Fiction is a way to explore various aspects of a theme or situation in a controlled, safe environment–including aspects that could never be explored in real life without harming real people. It’s a way to explore, dissect, understand, and rehearse traumas that could befall anyone. For those who’ve actually experienced something similar, it can help them process it, or be an outstretched hand and a voice saying “you aren’t alone; either I know that feel, or I can imagine having that feel if I put myself in your shoes.” For those who haven’t, it’s an outlet for anxiety, a mental preparation, a “what if?” and a “how might someone react to–?” And even the most twisted, fucked-up darkfic is usually an exercise in empathy: empathy for characters we already care about thrown into terrible situations, and also a space outside of actual RL horrors where we can take a deep breath and attempt the kind of radical empathy that lets us understand what drives people to do abhorrent things. As far as the first one goes, I certainly don’t think anyone should be compelled to partake if it distresses them, but I do think that actively discouraging and shaming people for trying to empathize with another’s suffering–even if they go about it badly or the execution is shoddy and distasteful–is utterly toxic behavior. As for the second, the kind that consists of trying to imagine your way into a perpetrator’s shoes: it may make you wildly uncomfortable, but understanding the reasons for a thing is among the best tools for recognizing and preventing real-world evil. Beyond that, dehumanization–even of villains, bullies, and abusers–is a dangerous impulse. No one’s required to empathize with the people who’ve hurt them, but making a fucking policy out of attacking everyone who tries only plants the seeds of further evil and abuse.

And we need these stories. Desperately. One of the reasons noncon/dubcon fic in particular has such a staggering variety of weird, fucked-up, iddy tropes and clumsy/insensitive/offensive executions is that we’re fucking marinating in rape culture and have very few scripts or outlets to talk about it. All of it. Even the ugly, unsavory parts, the impulses we know are wrong, the desires we hate or feel guilty about and can’t discuss without being accused of straight-up validating whatever heinous cultural messages planted them in our subconscious. Even the dumb, unrealistic power fantasies of fighting off rapists, taming rapists and making them love and respect you, walking away unaffected and being able to laugh it off as a wacky misadventure, being comforted by someone whose love (and/or healing cock) will magically fix everything. One person’s insensitive is another person’s escapism; one person’s offensive is another person’s “thank god, I’m not the only one broken enough to have that awful thought.” Fiction–particularly the communities that have formed around fanfiction–is one of the very few no-holds-barred places where we can Fucking Talk About It, without the pressure to speak only in hushed tones and behind closed doors where decent people won’t be exposed to it, or to uphold the image of a perfect model victim who never has ugly, unacceptable thoughts about the ugly mess left behind by an unspeakably ugly act. When you shame and police darkfic in fandom, you are taking that space away from the people who need it the most. You are telling them to their faces that they’re filthy, abnormal, tainted and contagious, and that they need to either shut the fuck up or keep it in the shame closet where it belongs instead of sharing it in public with other people who might understand. You are, in other words, doing the exact thing that’s tied with “I don’t believe you” for first place on the list of What Not To Say To A Survivor Opening Up About Their Abuse. Survivors aren’t the only ones with a tangle of conflicted thoughts, feelings, and neuroses about sexual violence and rape culture who benefit from exploring it in fiction, but you can be damn sure they’re a major constituency. The absolute last thing they need is some white-knight ‘anti’ bullying them into silence with concern-trolling about whether their “coping mechanisms” are “healthy” or whether they’re setting a sufficiently good and wholesome example for teh childrens.

The “only if you’re a survivor using it to cope!” bullshit is also noxious because fiction lets us handle difficult issues through several layers of distance and displacement, isolate particular aspects, transpose them into different but related situations, etc. Just because someone’s not a survivor of the exact thing they’re reading or writing about doesn’t mean they don’t have very real pain they’re trying to process. And again, empathy. I don’t give a shit what your sexual-assault history is; if you read my fucked-up Hydra Trash Party porn about Steve Rogers getting gang-raped by Crossbones & co and staggering away still shouting “FITE ME U PATHETIC ASSHOLES” even though he wants to die inside, and it hits you where you live, I’m fucking glad you found it. If I read your fucked-up Hydra Trash Party porn and hit a line that makes me feel like you’ve plucked something ugly and painful and private directly from my brain, frankly I’ll be even more impressed if it turns out you were extrapolating rather than writing from personal experience. And if your badwrong noncon porn is directly at odds with everything I’ve experienced re: rape and its aftermath? I don’t live inside your head, dude. I don’t know what you’re drawing on or what demons you’re exorcizing. I don’t even know whether you’re writing from firsthand experience that’s dramatically different from mine. All I know is that whoever your target audience is, it ain’t me.

One final note on noncon fic specifically: it works on the exact same principle as consensual nonconsent play IRL. No, the character(s) didn’t consent; neither did the persona being acted out by someone playing the victim in a con-noncon scene. The consent that distinguishes it from real-world violation isn’t between the characters in the fantasy; it’s between author and reader. The back button is the safeword. And in contrast to one of the dangers of IRL con-noncon play, it’s a safeword the author has zero power to override or ignore.

(b = mine)

Good post.

So I think it’s fair to say I have a dog in this race. I used to write darkfic for the Harry Potter fandom, and in fact one of the early bangs I was in was the HP darkfic big bang. Feels like it was a million years ago. The thing is, this debate was raging even then. Even back then, people were there to tell you what you can and can’t write, who should be able to write what, how far was too far. It drove me away from it to a certain extent, despite having made good friends. I had other reasons for leaving fandom, but the toxic environment around darkfic was a part of it.

I’ve inched back into writing darkfic for SPN. I’ve got a couple of really dark pieces up at the moment, for which the warnings are many. And here’s the thing: I’m not a survivor. If I have issues I’m working out, I’m not aware of them. But I do use fic to convey narrative as well as explore the emotions of the characters experiencing those things. I used my Handmaid’s Tale AU to tear up the A/B/O true mates trope. I used my demon Dean fic to explore how a character might be manipulated and groomed into doing something against his nature because of a love for someone that no longer exists. Hell, it’s not a darkfic, but I wrote A World As Yet Unseen because I wanted to really interrogate why disabilities in fic are so often magically cured at the end of a story, especially blindness. 

This is what we do. We explore characters. Yes, some people are exploring because they have some personal trauma, or even for some people a dark side they’re well aware of, but that’s not true of everyone, nor should it be. We write what we write because we can’t not write it, because these things, however they’re born inside you, insist on being given form and set free. And we slap on a billion warnings because it isn’t intended to hurt or wound or mislead people. It’s called what it is, labeled unashamedly, not so that haters can find it, but so that those who need it or want it can find it, and so that those who don’t want it can steer clear. When you make people ashamed of tagging things appropriately, you will stumble into those things inappropriately.

I am immensely proud that there are people who read my fic who need it. To insist I can’t write these stories because I’m not traumatized myself would deprive them of those stories. Most readers don’t leave comments for me because their reasons for reading are private. Some people I’m sure click back having realized it’s not for them. Finally, some people are creeping back in just to say ‘This was really hot, and I feel guilty for loving it so much’. I get less signed in kudos and comments for darkfic, because fandom has made people ashamed of it; a dirty little habit. But for the people who come to me and say ‘This story spoke to me’ or ‘this story was just what I needed today’–why is that of less value than if I’d written a fluffy romance and scratched someone’s perfectly morally unambiguous itch?

The most genuine and emotional comments I’ve ever received have been on darkfics. They strike an emotional chord with readers reliably because of the intensity of emotions portrayed. I had a commenter about this time last year who told me that the way I described Castiel’s relationship with emotions, his inability to label the complexity of these things he barely understood, made them feel like I was speaking just to them, that they could identify themselves within those descriptions. I don’t have difficulty with labeling my emotions, but I described it, and it touched another person. It meant so much to them that they left me comments saying so. 

Fiction – not just fanfiction – has supreme power like that. And really at the end of the day (as some additions to this post have added) you do not need to have experienced a thing to empathize with it. You can teach yourself about it, and approach the topic respectfully. Just like Jeff Lindsay didn’t have to kill people to write the Dexter series, and Anthony Horowitz isn’t actually a spy.

And some people are going to do a crappy job, but where do you get off judging them for that? People have to learn. God knows my Harry Potter darkfic is unbearable to my mature eyes, but it meant enough to enough readers at the time and in the years since that it as much as belongs to them as it does to me, and judging myself for it – removing it – would be judging them. You do not get to judge people on quality, because if so we wouldn’t have fanfic at all, because mainstream culture would have just waved fanfiction off as teenagers drivel years ago. Fanfiction is done. It’s problematic. Delete it all. After all, it’s not REAL writing amirite?

So look. I could get flak for my honesty here. Since I’m not untangling some dark place inside myself, people can obviously say whatever they like to me without feeling any guilt that they’re attacking someone vulnerable. Go for it, I’m handy with the block function. But I will stand by my belief that darkfic is a service to its community. You don’t need to have any part of it, you can pretend it doesn’t exist, but when you bully darkfic creators you destroy people, both writers and readers. In essence, you rob them of connection with fandom when you drive darkfic underground, because the people who need it (or hell, just want it) can’t find it, or worse, they don’t feel SAFE in fandom, don’t feel as though they have a place to exist. I find it ironic that the people who claim to want fandom to be a safe space in the purist moral sense are the same ones who want to make other people feel shitty and unwanted.

If you earn the trust of a darkfic reader, they will tell you what the genre means to them. They will tell you what specific fics mean to them, or a sentence, or they’ll tell you all about a single author who really gets them. Those moments of trust from my readers always let me know that I’m doing it right, so thank you to all those people, I am always grateful for your input and feedback.

you know who you are; no matter what they tell you

aidennestorm:

This is for you, my fellow darkfic fans– who, like me, enjoy wading (or sometimes outright swimming) in the tragic, the terrible, the twisted side of the fandom pool. This is for anyone who has ever felt targeted or been directly targeted simply for the fictional tropes you prefer. I’m not trying to provide advice, or invite discourse (hopefully not); this is just a personal message, from me to you.

And the message is this– you should never, ever feel like you need to break yourself into pieces to be accepted, liked, loved. You are a whole person, and you deserve to exist as a whole person. You have the right to exist as a whole person. You have the right to have people in your life that adore you for who you are, including your interests.

Of course, there’s always compartmentalization to a degree; I do it myself. Very few people in my offline life know what I do in fandom, or even know that I’m in fandom in the first place. I have very dear friends, also in fandom, who are squicked by tropes I love, and we’ve agreed that those won’t arise in conversation. That’s not what I mean, here.

What I mean is: the people who tell you that you’re bad, or immoral, or “insert any disparaging/hurtful/cruel epithet here”– they’re wrong. You know that fantasy is different than reality. You know that our fictional preferences don’t define our real life choices. You know, just like Lin-Manuel Miranda does, that “your art is a place to work stuff out”. 

We know who we are. No matter what they tell us.

I think another big problem on Tblr is that the content of f/f they accept HAS TO BE soft, pastel shit. If you write dark f/f, abusive f/f or just very sexual/kinky f/f you get yelled at too, no matter your gender or sexual orientation. You need to fall in line with what they want and produce the perfect pure (boring to death) content they want. Like can anyone tell me about ONE f/f pairing with a rougher/darker dynamic that is widely accepted on this goddamn website? (And I’m not even (cont)

leproblematique:

I had to dig a bit to find it, but here’s a long-ass thread to which I offered my own input (as @rhodanum, my old username) on how the fandom dynamics of F/F changed in the last few years and how purity crusaders hit F/F hard, before moving with all their shouting to M/M (with M/F being either ignored because ‘ewwwww het’  or condemned wholesale for ‘pushing heteronormativity’).

The unyielding influence of purity culture on F/F, particularly on here, is probably the main reason why I ship so very little femslash to begin with, despite being sexually and emotionally attracted to women. To put it bluntly, I’m not interested in the slightest in anodyne, flower-crown fluff or ‘soft lesbian pastel queens of Westeros’, as the OP put it so well (because this is a dynamic that can be seen across all fandoms, not just GoT/ASoIaF). To be clear, I’ve got no issue with people for whom that’s enjoyable, like and produce whatever content floats your boat, you’ll never get any grief from me on that account. My problem is that all too often, this is the only kind of F/F content permitted to exist, with anything else attacked mercilessly. That’s a sure-fire way to drive people away and tank the numbers of F/F fanworks, which is exactly what we’re seeing now.

As for ‘problematic’ F/F suddenly being presented as sparkles and rainbows… I suspect this is a natural consequence of purity culture and of people being dragged through the mud if their fave characters and ships are in any way unacceptable on here. In this context, people can either abandon their ships, keep on shopping them the same as before (not as easy as someone older, like me, makes it sound, particularly for young people whose entire social circles might be subscribing to purity culture) OR warp the characters and ship to such an extent that they fit Tumblr’s definition of ‘pure.’ Often, this is nothing more than a coat of thin pastel-paint that people slap on so they can be left the bloody hell alone.

The problem with this, as @janiedean pointed out above, is that you end up in the ludicrous situation where something you know is fucked-up in some way or other, is now getting presented as soft and twee and as if there’s nothing wrong whatsoever. Mind, I’m not approaching this from the purity angle, where my issue is that the content is problematic to begin with. My issue is that purity culture and its peddlers are creating the genuinely unhealthy situation where people are sweeping the problematic aspects of something under a paper-thin carpet, instead of working head-on with them and acknowledging them as such. The consensus when I was coming of age in fandom was that you could write and read and enjoy whatever messed-up content you damn well pleased, so long as you never lied to yourself or others about it being messed-up and tried to pass it off as ‘twu-wub’ or whatever else. That is an infinitely more healthy and less dangerous approach to complicated and messy topics than the ‘100% Pure or 100% Problematic’ approach I see these days, with one getting lionized and the other used as an excuse for harassment campaigns. It’s the same principle that’s led to another fandom consensus (tagging appropriately) starting to break down, with people now afraid to tag their works as ‘incest’ or whatever else applicable, because there are individuals trawling those tags looking for creators to harass.

janiedean:

going to talk about Tumblr’s vision of Margaery/Sansa. That stuff could be a very good badwrong ship with Margaery emotionnaly abusive Sansa and all we get is unicorns and rainbows!

HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH ANON AHAHAHAHAHAHAH 100% AGREED I mean I’m not even gonna touch the juvie show which has the exact same problem in the sense that the ff canon ship is EVERYTHING BUT UNPROBLEMATIC but people are all like UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS about it (ew) and that’s why I don’t touch it with a ten foot pole, but the fact that marg/sansa is seen as OMG THE SOFT LESBIAN PASTEL QUEENS OF WESTEROS and then their fans used to go tell sandor/sansa shippers that we sucked because we ship sansa with a guy who abuses her (????)….. hahahaha. god. I think it’s in the top three asoiaf/got notps more for that than for anything else, because usually I’d just dislike it and be done with it but the fact that they’re sold as this amazingly perfect healthy ship just irks me to really, really bad degrees.

and the fun thing is that the one f/f ship I have is **canon** and it’s actually fairly healthy/somewhat fluff (I mean for its canon) but since it’s in DEADWOOD and no one cares about deadwood and according to tumblr it’d be the most problematic show in existence even if I went and wrote them content NO ONE WOULD GIVE A FUCK so I mean… IF ONLY THESE PEOPLE AT LEAST WATCHED CONTENT WITH F/F CANON SHIPS but naaaaaah. *shrug* and the fun thing of all this dumbass debate is that the aforementioned f/f ship has *one* explicit fic on ao3 and *I* wrote it (and it most likely isn’t the best lesbian sex you ever read but hey I tried because those two are my dynamic and I love them) and someone actually podficced it BECAUSE IT WAS THE ONLY ONE so I actually most probably did more for the canon f/f ship than any of the people on that post, but hey, I’m a horrid straight person who only has fetishes and has committed the heinous crime of preferring m/m. whatever.

IF ONLY THESE PEOPLE AT LEAST WATCHED CONTENT WITH F/F CANON SHIPS but naaaaaah 

Or they’ll watch content with canon F/F and then howl all the way to the moon about age-gaps or ‘power-imbalances’ or whatever the hell else it’s popular to howl about, because there’s always something that can be problematized, if given enough time and creativity (no, I will never stop being a salty queer European over the shitshow that was CMBYN ‘discourse’).

Hi! I wanted to address an ask you answered a few days ago about violence in m/m vs. f/f. I think you’re absolutely right, that there is more violence in m/m content because men are the subjects & most people are socialized to recognize and accept men as more violent (as well as better accustomed to withstanding violence.) Part of what makes the argument of the other ask so ridiculous, is that this entire anti movement paints itself as coming from a place of social awareness, (cont.)

shinelikethunder:

fiction-is-not-reality:

smallswingshoes:

rhodanum:

lvxiuwendono:

fangasmagorical:

lvxiuwendono:

profujoshi:

comes from a place of sexism. I mentioned how people are accustomed to the imagery of men in dark, violent situations; male characters go through this stuff all the time! (Not just in m/m) In contrast, female characters generally aren’t allowed to go through disturbing situations and are certainly not allowed to be the cause of them. It comes back to girls being sweet, soft, and innocent in a way that tumblr often misguidedly perpetuates. (cont.)

The fact is, women are just as dark and disturbing as men bc all our minds work in the same way, and there ARE women abusers and women rapists and, yes, EVEN f/f rape and abuse. It exists in real life, so I think the fact that there is practically NO fictional media portraying it is far more telling than the fact that m/m rape fic exists. In fact, I hate to pull out the survivor card or, but I was raped and abused brutally by another girl as a young teen. I want to read manga & stuff (cont.)

about similar situations, because everyone enjoys reading about characters they can relate to. It was completely disheartening when I was younger to not be able to EVER find a similar situation portrayed. It made me feel like I was some extreme statistical outlier. However, I wasn’t. It is simply that media & fandom & society doesn’t like to show violent, disturbing girls; it’s a way of keeping girls ‘palatable’. If you’ve ever read/watched any f/f content (I’ve read a LOT tbh), a lot of (cont.)

the characters are the same worn-out stereotypes doing the same worn-out things, because variety is not encouraged when it comes to women. It’s literary same-face syndrome. Anyway, I’ve ranted quite a bit. My final point is: social awareness has no law over fiction. However, if you really want to play the social issues card, at least understand what it is you’re talking about. Thanks for putting up with all the asks! -fop.

I don’t have much to add to this because you’ve covered everything so thoroughly. Speaking just from a media standpoint, it’s a shame that we see so few female villains and even when we do, they are usually objectified or their character traits all revolve around seduction and sex. There’s just no variety. 

And in the real world, ofc, denying that women can be horrible or punishing them less than men for the same crime is just doing them a disservice. Putting women on a pedestal is harmful too and is especially horrible for the people who suffer abuse at the hands of a woman. 

Huh? It may be a generational or cultural thing,  but ever since I started getting involved in femslash fandom rape and violence has been the favourite plots,  be it subtle,  character driven portrayals like Shoujo Kakumei Utena or explicit rape fantasy fanservice like Cross Ange or Valkyrie Drive.  Like,  favourite plots of porny Sailor Moon fiction is “Sailor Soldiers raped by female villians”. Slash and femslash are exactly the same. 

So far as I can tell, it is generational. Femslash used to be very much the same as mslash in the nineties and early 2000s, in terms of darkness and villainy.

However, the recent reactionary backswing to purity politics in fandom which is only just now reaching mslash, completely wiped out all concept of female villains in fandom years ago. 

First, let’s look at, as you mentioned, Sailor Moon. Specifically, I am thinking of the once immensely popular (though now rather less so) shipping of Chibi-usa and Hotaru’s villainous forms. Although the villain x villain version of the ship lives on, as does the good x good version, I remember very clearly how popular Mistress 9 x Chibi-Usa fics, art, and fandom activity were. 

And in those pairings of a villain and a protagonist, there were extensive studies- both fetishistic and not- of rape, abuse, manipulation, grooming. It was dark, it was violent, it was all over the place. 

And we knew, of course, that it was bad. We were shipping villains, after all. We knew what was going on was horrible. BUt it was also engaging, interesting, and in my case, proof that people like me (abuse and rape victims) existed. 

These fics were some of the ways I found comfort and catharsis after I was raped, which is why the memory of them sticks so much. And why the stark absence of newer works in the same vein is so easy for me to see.

Fast forward a couple of decades and look at another prominent magical girl series that is rife with opportunity to explore horrible subjects: Madoka Magica.

Here we have a set up that begs for the same treatment: a dark haired, purple themed girl who does horrible, dangerous things out of a misguided, manipulative, dangerous love for a pretty pink innocent. 

And yet, any time art and fiction in that vein bubbled up in the (female dominated parts of) the fandom, it led to immense harassment campaigns. People being driven off their sites and rings for daring to suggest that the all-too-canon obsession and pain Homura experiences, and the total lack of consequence for her any action, might lead to the inevitable abuse that, somewhat ironically, was itself canonized in the final movie.

The fights were immense, and they were brief. Within a few months, the shift was well and truly complete. Discussing the dangerous, villainous aspects of Homura’s character was all but illegal. The only way it was acceptable was if you were decrying the entire show as “abuse porn.” Certainly you could not make fic or art on the subject.

It happened with other fandoms too, nearly simultaneously. I remember, for example, the entire Vriska debate in homestuck: another character who was openly and unapologetically awful, and whose awfulness it was not acceptable to explore unless you were spending twice as much energy decrying- loudly, aggressively- how bad she was and how anyone who enjoyed her was also criminally violent.

Personally, I assume it was a manifestation of the increasing social awareness of fandom and tumblr, taking an unfortunate turn.

This purity-obsessed backlash never really hit on male characters, and male/male ships.

Until now.

With female characters and female ships having been driven into submission almost uniformly these days, what’s left is male characters and ships.

Which is where modern anti-shippers come in, screaming not only about how good (how obedient, how cleansed) f/f ships are (because any trace of villainy has been stripped form them for almost a decade), but how anyone who ships filthy, dirty m/m is dangerous and criminal too. 

Which is odd, for a group claiming to be socially just, since they… habitually refer to queer ships and criminal and disgusting. 

BUt homophobia is cool when you’re using it to punish women authors/artists for not conforming to ever-tightening restrictions on what they are allowed to do and create.

Ah, such a gread addition.  @rhodanum, @andarthas-web

This touches on a TON of my issues with fandom. In order: 

I noticed the cleansing of femslash of any ‘impure’ elements over the years. The end-result can be seen clearly on Tumblr, where you see femslash ships and dynamics constantly being referred to in soft, gentle, twee, pastel terms, again and again and again, no matter the ship. More power to people who enjoy that, but the problem is that it’s usually the only sort of presentation you run into because it’s the only sort of presentation allowed to exist without some sort of backlash. Same thing about people going on and on about how ‘perfect’ and how ‘pure’ femslash ships are. It just sets my teeth on edge, not just because it’s a classical manifestation of purity culture in action, but because perfection and purity as tropes bore me to absolute death! 

Give me female villain/heroine ships with absolutely nothing gentle about them! Give me female anti-heroines that are as flawed and filled with mistakes and jagged edges as the archetypal male Byronic Heroes, who constantly fuck up and wreck their relationships, because they can’t deal appropriately with emotional intimacy! Give me middle-aged, hard-faced, ruthless lady Generals who have short-term, no-strings-attached relationships with woman after woman after woman in the Legions, because they lost their great love years ago and nothing else comes close. Give me femslash ships with faults, with sharpness, with cruelty, with control, with Stockholm Syndrome, with irredeemable mistakes. Don’t spend all your time trying to cram anodyne flower-crown fluff down my throat, because all it’ll do is just make me tell you to go piss up a rope. 

The fact that purity bullshit moved to M/M ships after the F/F contingent was suitably ‘tamed’ isn’t any surprise to me at all. You can see it right now, with the constant shouting about what people are ‘allowed’ to write in the slash fics. Brutality? Violence? Sexual violence? Dark kinks? All of it right out. Until what you’re left with is the same thing as with femslash – an endless parade of ‘this ship is so pure uwuuuu’ and ‘this ship is so healthy uwuuuu’ and ‘this ship is so balanced uwuuuu’ with almost nothing else, unless you’re willing to open yourself to some heavy-duty harassment and denigration. To be clear, my issue isn’t the existence of healthy, balanced ships – I believe in variety being what gives meaning to life and variety also being what makes fandoms interesting. Meaning Cinnamon Roll ships co-existing with much darker ones, without a constant trend to make the latter disappear, by any means necessary, until the former dominates across fandoms. 

oh my god… this actually explain so much for me??? about me???

like, i kinda felt like a bad queer for not finding as much enjoyment from f/f fanfics but… this is why. i have trouble finding anything with suitably angtsy/dark/complex/anything other than fluffy content. wow.

A perfect explanation on why I can count on the fingers of one hand the f/f stories that I really like

This reminds me, anyone got any recs for Root/Shaw being a fucked-up, violent, four-alarm dumpster fire? Like, not even talking abuse here. Just fic that revels in them being maladjusted human disasters who enjoy shooting people just a little too much, and spend their first meeting smirking and flirting through an entirely nonconsensual torture scenario.

I mean. Canon alone gets them into so much wild-ass shit. It’d be a shame if fandom didn’t match and surpass it.

This may seem kinda weird, but do you have or know of any sources about how Problematic Things™ in fiction and fanfiction will not neccesarily normalize those things in real life? I’m having a discussion about censorship with some people and trying to build an argument about why fiction should never be policed or censored.

Thanks! 😊 The discussion specifically started between the shipping of Deadpool and Tom Holland’s Spiderman. So I guess the Problematic Thing initially started as age differences in relationships. It’s kind of expanded from there. I’m just trying to say that fiction shouldn’t be policed, and the idea that it “affects reality” isn’t a good reason to control content. Thanks for the blog rec, I’ll check it out!

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long, anon. I’ve been super busy this week and I haven’t really had the time to actually sit down and find things for you. I hope that this helps, though. 

Cool! Gotcha! (I’m sorry I’m going to be presumptuous and assume you’re American for this one b/c I know American legal stuff and I’m gonna be throwing some supreme court stuff at you.) 

So it’s kind of tough to actually give you sources on this topic. A lot of what I’ve found revolves around “media” in general and not fiction specifically. On top of that, things that do study specific media tend to zero in on specific topics (violent video games, romance novels with abusive or borderline abusive male leads, ect) so it’s difficult to actually approach this holistically. Fanfiction on it’s own isn’t really studied as much as I feel it should be, either, so we don’t actually have much in terms of how Problematic topics in fanfic affect those who read them. We don’t actually know how and what about fanfic might influence readers, or in what way, and all we really have at this point in anecdotal evidence which doesn’t really help if you want real sources. 

I will say, as just a bit of advice, if you’re arguing with folks on tumblr there’s probably nothing you can say to them that will change their minds if they already have a strong opinion. It doesn’t matter what ship it is, how you write it, or why you write it, if someone is really determined that some kinds of fiction just shouldn’t exist and they’re willing to throw around the “affects reality” argument in order to convince you you’re wrong, they don’t care. A lot of the arguments on tumblr aren’t actually about principles, they’re about ship wars and there’s not a damn thing you can do when it comes to someone’s OTP. It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that anti-censorship is more of a principle than anything else. 

First, normalization. If you don’t have a definition of normalization already, here’s a link to the wikipedia article that gives a brief definition of what the term means in a sociological context. It’s important to note, too, that normalization isn’t something that’s done through just one channel, nor is it completely the same in every group that has it’s own culture. (For certain groups of fans it’s considered “normal” to talk about sex and sexuality as honestly and openly as one wants to. This isn’t necessarily “normal” for other groups in other contexts, however.) Normalization is a process. 

Second, fiction in general can contribute to normalization of any given thing but it’s not the sole factor. It’s difficult to find sources on this that aren’t either behind a pay wall or very small sample-size wise for just plan fiction. This link might be helpful in illustrating that, while there could be a link between violent media and aggressive behavior, the extent to which violent media actually causes violent behavior is unknown and possibly more complex than we’re equipped to study currently. It also has references to other things that might be helpful to read. Here’s an article on psychology today about the lack of a link between violent video games and violence IRL. Here’s a HuffPo article specifically about whether or not pornography leads to sexual violence (the answer is no according to the article and the study they cite). Because let’s be honest, the folks you’re going to run into are often more concerned about the sexual content of the fanfic and fiction they’re railing against. This article talks about the potential reason we’re drawn to violent media; we like the thrill without the danger. 

That psych today article on violent video games includes reference to a Supreme Court decision where the court struck down a California law that barred the sale and rental of violent video games to anyone under 18. I suggest you read the majority opinion on that case because it specifically deals with whether or not limitations should be put on whether or not children should be allowed access to violent media. I would also take a look at the US obscenity laws here .  Obscenity laws are more helpful for arguing principles than they are for the normalization arguments because that third clause in the test for whether a piece violates US law specifically takes into account literary, artistic, and political merit. This means that we can often find things absolutely repugnant, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist. These laws make the standard in favor of expression and not disgust. 

So now here’s the tricky thing – fiction can and does impact the real world. We can be inspired by art to make changes in our world. Seeing someone who looks like you or struggles with the same issues as you do in a fictional world can mean a lot for a lot of people. It can be inspiring or completely disheartening. Fiction can make us more empathetic, too. So yes, fiction does have an impact on us. I mean, we’ve only been telling ourselves stories for as long as we’ve been human so I don’t think it can be stated enough that it’s really a part of who we are as a species. It shapes us and we shape it. The question in my mind, though, is whether art reflects life or life reflects art. I’m of the opinion that it’s both, but we don’t tend to write or depict “problematic” things in our art out of nowhere. A lot of the things folks get bent out of shape about in fanfic happens in real life and they’re worried that somehow fic is going to make it seem “okay” if it’s a) not properly demonized or b) written about at all. (No one really complains that depicting dragons razing villages is going to cause more arson, you know?) However, the evidence doesn’t really seem to support the idea that depicting abnormal or immoral things will encourage abnormal or immoral behavior. 

I hope this helped, anon. And I hope you get many hours of enjoyment out of spideypool! Sorry for taking so long, lol. 

anti-anti-survivor:

micaxiii:

anti-anti-survivor:

The concept that only abuse survivors should write about abuse in a fictional setting helps antis achieve their modus operandi of the harassment of other tumblr users. Either they cause emotional distress by outing someone as a survivor and making them talk about their abuse in order to avoid harassment, or the targeted person is now open season for harassment for refusing to comply or not being an abuse victim in the first place.

What’s important is to listen and boost the voices of abuse survivors and help achieve a better understanding of what abuse is and looks like, instead of telling other people they’re not qualified enough to speak on a topic.

If you think someone isn’t qualified enough (and you have the spoons and/or the capability to do so) educate them.

I mean in the end, if you find a person is portraying abuse in a harmfully inaccurate way, it doesn’t really matter what experience they have because they still might need to be educated on what’s what.

so it just feels pointless to make a big deal about who is and isn’t allowed to write about stuff. if they do a bad job they do a bad job and we tell them “you did a bad job”, if they’re famous and therefor highly influential we might write articles and make memes, and then we move on to make our own and/or praise others’ good work instead.

I agree with this. It goes into ‘criticize the work, not the person writing it.’