There is no such thing as an unproblematic piece of media, production team, or morally-pure person. There isn’t. There’s only “what flaws I am willing to put up with,” which is going to be different for every person. If your friend has a different level of acceptable bullshit than you, it’s probably fine, actually? The sooner people learn that, the happier in general they will be.
(via primedoverlord)
For the record, if somebody accuses you of being heinous in whatever way because you write fiction they don’t like, or tag fiction in a way they don’t like, or ship fictional characters in a way they don’t like, you don’t have to rebut them. It’s tempting to, for sure—nobody enjoys unfairness—but you don’t have to. That is, obviously you don’t owe anything to whoever is accusing you, but far more importantly, nobody you need to take seriously is going to expect you to rebut shit.
You don’t have to respond to accusations that are stupid on their face.
Someone showing up in your inbox, or railing on your timeline, or ranting in your AO3 comments about these things is the internet equivalent of a stranger accosting you on the street and saying, “You son of a bitch, you’re wearing chartreuse. Prove to me you don’t paint innocent cows green in the night.” That is not a thing you need to defend yourself against unless somebody shows up at your house with a warrant, CCTV footage, and a really unhappy cow.
This holds true no matter what the fiction is about or what the tags are or what the relationship between the fictional characters happens to be like. Especially anything that’s going to come after a phrase like, “Yeah, mostly, but I draw the line at….”
(via primedoverlord)
Anonymous asked:
Anti pedo is left wing you idiot
Oh right, yeah it’s there in the essays of Emma Goldman right next to degeneracy and decadence. My bad.
Fuck off. Go look at some 50s lavender scare anti gay propaganda and find out where the idea of what you think is pedophilia comes from.
Newsflash, it’s always been an attack on marginalized communities and if you think abuse can in any case be attributed to sexuality you have swallowed up the fash cool aid like so many other self proclaimed leftists who’s ability to do structural analysis of society ends once puritanism and youth oppression are concerned.
Like, you’re really here advocating for mass culling of an entire demographic and pretending to not be a nazi. Maybe even to yourself.
Get fucked, buddy.
Yup. Pedophilia is bad.
But jokes about “pedo=lead deficient” just spread the idea that anyone labelled a pedo or groomer is a justified target for immediate violence. Right wingers have spent the last year directly associating lgbt folks as groomers. Where do you think this is going?
It’s literally the justification nazis used to lock up anyone not cishet. “Kill pedos” doesn’t help anyone.
1. You are responsible for your own media experience.
2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.
3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.
4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.
5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.
6. Content creators are not your parents and owe you nothing, not even a breakdown on why their content isn’t problematic. You don’t get to demand a dissertation denouncing any and everything unhealthy in a piece you don’t like. Move on.
7. Tagging is a nicety but not an obligation. You can message people, politely, and ask them to tag things, and many people will, but understand that it’s their blog and they aren’t obliged to say yes. Unfollow and block when you need to. Circling back to number 1, you are responsible for curating your own experience.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Remember at the end of the day, there are actual living, breathing people behind each screen name. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face in real life.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to remember this.
(via primedoverlord)
It’s true and you should say it.
(via primedoverlord)
Reminder that fanfic as a whole humanizes queer relationships more than almost any other form of storytelling out there, and it is not dirty or inherently fetishizing to enjoy it✌🏼
Additional reminder that fanfic has been a gateway for literally thousands of people to realize and explore their own sexuality in a place that is safer and more understanding than most offline spaces. It has allowed people to realize they are trans, ace, gay, not gay, pan, bi, demi, nonbinary. It has been a place of support for queer people since before a good percentage of fandom was born. And saying who gets to enjoy what part of fandom in which way is completely antithetical to the whole point of fanfic.
(via primedoverlord)
I’m pissed because we did not spend decades upon decades before the term proship was even thing building fandom up into what it is today just for a bunch of entitled, snot nosed little shits to come around and say the space belongs to them now and we’re no longer welcome.
“Proshippers” created fandom years before “proship” and “antiship” were even concepts. Antis don’t get to come in and change the narrative now that fandom is “mainstream”. This is where the weirdos (affectionate) gather and it’s always been that way.
I miss the simple days when, for the most part, people just minded their own damn business. I miss when the worst thing someone could say to me over shipping royed or something was “they’re not even gay, you freak!”, instead of immediately accusing me of literal pedophilia over a cartoon. I miss when fandom was chill and not a morality crusade.
I miss when people could tell the difference between a series of lines on a screen and a real person.
That’s just it, though. They CAN tell the difference between a series of lines on a screen, and a real person. But they’re so caught up in jacking themselves off to their false sense of moral superiority that they don’t care that they are hurting a real person over a cartoon.
(via primedoverlord)
‘The Lion King’ Turns 20: Every Crazy, Weird Fact About the Disney Classic -
I felt like it would be interesting to share this article. As it turns out, the idea of Simba and Nala being first cousins was an early draft snafu that was later edited out, when Sarafina, then named Naanda, was Sarabi’s sister. There’s some tidbits I haven’t heard of before in here. Including Nala’s father. According to Wikipedia, he was named. But eventually dropped. Could you imagine a world where Sean Connery voiced Mufasa?
So many anti friend groups are just straight up cults and it’s genuinely terrifying to see and be part of.
If you’re scared of your friends for whatever reason, it you’re scared of liking being in a specific fandom or liking a specific ship because you think you’ll lose all your friends over it, if your friend group is essentially built on the idea that you’re all good and everyone else is bad, if your friends use social ostracization and online stalking and harassment campaigns as threats and weapons, if your friends use fear and moral panic to keep people in line… . .
Please get out of there. This isn’t even about shipping or fandom or whatever, it’s about staying safe and not getting sucked into a literal cult. Cut them off, block them on all your social media, remake accounts if you need to, and make new friends who don’t leave you feeling like you’re walking on eggshells around them. Just stay safe.
Having to reblog the right call outs, memes, and discourse at the right time, or come under suspicion or attack yourself? Getting scolded or called out for delay in responding to messages, even if you were away from your computer? New friends must be vetted by powerful members of the group? Private discussions may be screenshotted and shared at any time? Behavior control.
Extensive block lists with social consequences if your friends find you still follow any of those people? Mainstream books or news sources with conflicting opinions dismissed as “problematic” or out of touch? Information control.
Being expected to adopt the newest language, positions and targets without explanation even if they rapidly change? Any concerns or objections dismissed as evidence of incurable stupidity at best, unforgivable moral corruption at worst? Lumping wide varieties of info and theory together in simple good and evil categories? Thought control.
Effusive praise for complying with group demands, including and especially behavior that may make you uncomfortable, like bullying others? Seeing your friends send dissenters death threats? “Hot and cold” treatment, favoritism, competition for attention by powerful or BNF members of the group? Guilt trips about spending time and attention elsewhere? Emotion control.
This is an amazing breakdown, thank you so much.
The antis in the notes are a good example of another cult tactic I experienced: trying to smear anyone who leaves their cult as a pedophile. When I was in a friend group with antis, anyone and everyone outside the group was a pedophile, a molestor, a predator, evil, etc. and if you left then by God they’d make sure everyone in the fandom knew you were also all of the above buzzwords. And in the same way, antis still in the cult that is being an anti yell “you’re pro-pedophilia if you disagree with us!” at the OP without providing a single way in which they’re not a cult.
And that’s because they can’t prove it. At the end of the day, they can’t say, “we’re not a cult and here’s three reasons why” because they just don’t have ammunition. If a group can’t give you a reason why they’re not a cult beyond “cults are bad and we’re good” or “we can’t be a cult, we’re against __”, it’s definitely a cult.
I remember being an anti and being constantly worried my friends would read something into whatever piece of media I’d watched/read lately. They could find evil in anything; whether it was Disney’s Tangled or Romeo and Juliet, everything was secretly pedophilia and you might have to denounce it any day now. Any admission of liking a thing could and would be used against you. My liking emo bands was used as proof against me at one point, as if crushing on men over a decade (or two) my senior was a sign of sexual deviancy. Having a Neopets account was “proof of pedophilic intent” according to them.
And as with all Evangelical conservative groups/traditional religious cults/secular cults that use group shaming, I was expected to repent of the sin of it all, denounce Disney and Shakespeare and Fallout Boy and Neopets as if I’d done some unspeakable crime by watching/reading/listening to the wrong thing.
I did not repent, and they attacked immediately. Everything ever said to them in confidence was used against me in public. The flood of suicide baiting was everywhere, as were graphic rape threats and death threats. One specific death threat was five thousand words long and the same person would painstakingly put it in my inbox one ask at a time. “We’re normal people,” this person specifically often said. “‘Anti’ just means normal person,” he would say on the same blog he was using to tell me how he wanted to carve me open and rearrange my organs while I was still alive. “I’m normal,” he would say while detailing what he wanted to do with my corpse after he’d killed me. “I’m protecting kids.”
This was also the same year antis tried to convince a woman to kill herself because she had her first initial + surname as her Twitter handle and her Twitter handle happened to share the name of a ship antis didn’t like/thought was pedophilia/thought was evil? IDK I didn’t watch the show, all I know is her initial + surname of Lance had people asking her if she wanted to fuck kids and telling her they’d beat her to death in the streets if they saw her.
“Normal” people will not fantasize about rearranging your organs because you liked a movie they didn’t like. “Normal” people will not threaten to murder a woman they’ve never met because her initials somehow equal support for pedophilia. “Normal” people would not believe someone’s initials are code for support of anything, because that’s just not a thing that makes sense.
Antis, Q-Anon, it’s all the same: “We’re normal! We fight pedophiles! We only hurt you because you deserve to be hurt!” Q-Anon thinks Wayfair furniture sells children in their cabinets, antis think initials are code for pedophilia, and asking how either of those things makes sense is not allowed, you just have to nod and accept it on faith no matter how outlandish the claim is.
If the only reason you don’t walk away from a group of “friends” or dare disagree with their strange, nonsensical opinions is fear of the mob turning on you, they’re not normal, they’re a cult.
If you feel like you have to show up on a post that’s just, “guys, if your friend group is toxic and cult-y, walk away and protect yourself,” and argue with that, bc not doing so makes you a “bad person” in the eyes of your friend group, or could get you in trouble… You need that post.
A list of warning signs for cult grooming is not controversial. Ever.
(via primedoverlord)
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
I just doom-scrolled through the comments
Taking a moment to make my stance clear on this blog.
If you don’t like a ship, don’t read them. You don’t need to accuse fans of a ship you don’t like of being literal criminals and sexual deviants.
Ship who you want to ship.
“Yes, ship who you want to ship, unless it’s—“ NOPE. I did not stutter. I said “ship who you want to ship. (Period)”
(via primedoverlord)