fangirltothefullest:

:

People seem to not know how old writers are when they make their stories.

Stephanie Meyer wrote Twilight in 2003, at age 29

Cassandra Clare started writing Mortal Instruments in 2004, at age 31

Rick Riordan published Percy Jackson & the Olympians, the book about 12yrolds, at age 41

George R. R. Martin published A Game of Thrones, at age 48

You can’t even use the “but fanfiction isn’t real writing” argument because of how many fanfiction turn movies there is. They are clearly enough of a story to be made into published books.

Anna Renee Todd’s After series was a Harry Styles fanfiction, which was published in 2014, when she was 25

E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey series was a Twilight fanfiction, which was published in 2011, when she was 48

Mortal Instruments was a Harry Potter fanfiction.

Why must they act like After someone turns 20 their life ends, like people can’t have hobbies???

No I think it’s worse- they’re not mad that you’re doing stuff after you’re 20, they’re saying it’s morally disgusting for an adult to write about people underage. They’re so bombarded in this hyperchristianized mindset that they think any written thing by an adult, if it’s about a character that’s underage, means it must be pedophilia and its getting really really REALLY old.

Spoilers: fiction isn’t real

I’m sorry to tell everyone but Peter Parker, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson aren’t real living alive with a body and feelings people, no matter how well written they are.

Sonic the hedgehog is not in fact a real living blue talking hedgehog.

ignightroad:

astriferaas:

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activismadult women aren’t inherently creepy for being in fandom and having hobbies apart from raising babies and doing taxesthe vast majority of people pushing back against the worrying trend of instigating harassment over fictional characters and relationships aren’t incest supporters or pedophiles, actuallyliking a m/f ship doesn’t make someone a dirty heterosexual invading your spacepreferring gay ships doesn’t make you ‘’woke’’ and good no one owes you a disclaimer that they are a good person who recognizes that their favorite fictional villain’s actions are evil and that they don’t condone those actions irlliking a fictional villain is in no way comparable to advocating abuse/murder/genocide/etc and you’re a fucking idiot if you believe thatjust because a woman is attracted to a fictional villain doesn’t mean she’s promoting toxic relationships or going to end up in a toxic relationship. assuming women can’t tell fiction and reality apart stinks of internalized misogyny some rando’s a/b/o fanfics have none of the level of influence that popular tv shows and movies spreading propaganda haveno one owes you a detailed description of their traumas and mental health problemsabusive relationships are not the same as enemies to lovers shipsy’all need to chill the fuck out over people, relationships, actions and events that don’t actually exist and learn how to enjoy and discuss them like normal peoplefandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

feel free to add more

“Proship” is the fandom norm. It’s always BEEN the fandom norm. Do not let Twitter or Instagram or wherever tell you it means ‘problematic shipper’ or ‘pro-incest/pedo/etc’.

It literally means you do you, I’ll do me; if I don’t like what you’re writing or drawing, I’ll just block/mute or scroll on by. It’s literally anti-harassment. It’s not sending death threats over a ship or telling folks to kill themselves for liking content. It’s letting folks enjoy fandom the way they want to.

It never HAD a label until fandom activists decided to make it a negative term so that antis could appear more ‘morally correct’ and pure.

Please do not see ‘proship’ on someone’s bio and attack them: chances are, you’ve been seriously uneducated about the term or fandom normal. Proship has never been a bad thing and I’m tired of seeing people claiming every proshipper condones awful awful things when they don’t.

the-final-sif:

“Antis’ foundation is the belief that fiction affects reality, in that any problematic behaviors or topics in media, fictitious or not, will cause people to normalize those behaviors, resulting in people (specifically minors) thinking that such actions are acceptable in real life. This is a common argument used by conservative groups to enact queer censorship, who argue that children who see LGBTQIA+ characters in television or books will "turn gay” (Bollinger 2019), so the sanitization of all adult fan spaces is therefore required to protect minors who could potentially encounter problematic sexual content (BrazyDay 2019)….

Antis attempt to glorify their ideology by rebranding it as antipedophilia and anti-incest, but it is actually a loose ideology of disinformation, virtue signaling, and legitimate abuse. Similar to the QAnon cult phenomena, which began in 2017, anti dogma is designed to promote paranoia and play off people’s fears and emotions to spread disinformation. They band together to perform this function, forming what might be called a cult, a term that has been defined as a group having a “great devotion to a…movement”. However, what truly marks a cult is the control attempted over behavior and thought. Participants in anti circles perpetuate a climate of fear, shame, and trauma in fan spaces. The most common targets of such abuse are women, people of color, teens, abuse survivors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Fans who are already marginalized are further deprived of safety, anonymity, outlets for growth, self-expression, and relationships. It is therefore vital that we closely monitor hate speech in fan spaces and study these behaviors. Our failure to do so may open doors for bigotry, violence, and disinformation.“

From The cult structure of the American anti which was a fascinating read and genuinely worth going through if you’re in fannish spaces.

brightlotusmoon:

dduane:

beardedmrbean:

headspacedad:

herotovillain:

holyfoal:

“middle aged women shouldn’t participate in fandom” and you think it’s teenagers that are writing those brilliant, incisive 100k fics of your favourite characters

Louder.

or who write the shows/movies/books your fandoms are based on

There is a line

Where things start to get really really creepy and weird.

Oh indeed?

Don’t imagine that the likes of you get to tell us where that line is, youngling. Or attempt to cite the Old Fandom Magic to us. We were there when it was written. In fact, some of us wrote it.

…Let’s stay inside the 20th century for the moment (though it would be possible to take this further back). I come of the generation of fans who invented media fandom. I remember the laboriously printed fanzines piled up on convention dealers’ tables (and the fanzines that were kept out of sight under those tables… the source of the descriptor “slash”). I remember the letter campaign that first saved Star Trek. (And am proud to say that Bjo and John Trimble were fandom-neighbors of mine.)

I remember the great New York Trek conventions where the power of that fandom first began to reveal itself: the conventions where big center-city hotels got so oversubscribed that the fire marshals had to intervene. I remember the legendary Trek con at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan where the ladies who normally worked a nearby brothel bought memberships and started working convention registration because they saw us having so much fun with our fandom. I was twenty feet away when Bill Shatner got hit with that pie during his GoH speech (and I know who paid for it to happen). I was there the time a guy dressed as the Starship Enterprise and another one dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser got into a (staged) fistfight during a costume competition and fell off the runway onto the guests.

I was at the Sunday morning con-committee breakfast when somebody came up with a note Nichelle Nichols had pushed under the con suite door (while plastered, she later told us), asking for champagne and eggs Benedict for breakfast. I saw the distraught expressions among the concom—and some other guests: seriously, what was Fred Pohl doing there?—since unfortunately there was no room service in the hotel on Sunday. And then, among the groans, heard the unexpected response (since the first McDonald’s in Manhattan had just opened across the road): “I know. Let’s get her an Egg McMuffin and a Colt 45.”*

But under all this light-hearted stuff lay a lot of hard work and commitment to sharing the fun with others. With my contemporaries, a majority of whom were female, I watched the fandom we’d built start to grow and thrive and spread to other shows, other media, building on the blueprints we’d drawn. I watched other Trek fans turn into professional writers and editors and even a few showrunners (some of them even writing for Trek, which gave a lot of us the chuckles). I’ve seen mass-media fandom as a whole become a worldwide phenomenon, now taken for granted everywhere, and treated like something that’s always existed. Except—before us—it didn’t.

More to the point: the ever-increasing attendance at such public events, and then the sheer size and undiminished drive of online fandom when it finally got started, had the effect of emboldening the studios that would eventually start making even more shows that would leverage the power of that fandom, and the advertisers who would indirectly help pay for them. Meanwhile, the fellowship built among fans of all ages during that growth has remained, and it too has grown and spread.

So my coevals and I assert the inalienable right to keep on being part of what we helped make. We’re in our fifties and sixties and even sometimes our seventies, now, this founder-generation of fans and its immediate descendants. We built this superstructure of passion. We continue to participate in it because we’ve made lifelong friendships in it, and because we haven’t stopped finding enjoyment in the characters and media we came to love as younger people. We welcome the influx of new fans (in their twenties, or thirties, or forties, or whatever) into old fandoms… as long as they don’t start acting like they think they have the right to dictate who else will be there, on the basis of some utterly specious premise like being “too old” to have “Young People Fun” any more.

Youth is not about how many years you’ve been on the planet. Joy is not about being young. If you honestly think it is, you’d better find out who lied to you, and get yourselves sorted out—before a horrible dry joyless age of, like thirty or forty, descends upon you, and you find yourself stuck in it forever, trapped in your own ageism with no way out.

Meanwhile, if you imagine we’re going to be run off a whole half-century old way of life by a crowd of humorless, self-important, overentitled babes in arms who think people (especially women over twenty) shouldn’t be allowed to continue having whatever kind of fun they choose to in their (soi-disant) “old age”…?

Think again. We’re not going anywhere. And as for you, with your pouting and whining that we should go home and make our spouses sandwiches or something, and abandon what we founded?

Not gonna happen.

Make no mistake. We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us. Don’t like it? (points) The fire escape doors are thataway, leading into other platforms you may find less threatening. As for us, we’re keeping this one. (We’ve just barely got the decorating the way we want it…!) Here we will stay and continue to celebrate the fandoms we love. We have a right to exist, and to be part of the phenomena we helped create. We’ll welcome you as you grow up enough to appreciate it.

…Assuming you can.

*…Which she loved, BTW. She’d forgotten about the note and was delighted to find that someone had brought her any breakfast at all.

Originally posted by shiroi-majo

Originally posted by meier-mar

athingofvikings:

lifblogs:

lifblogs:

Antis care more about fictional children than real children.

Actually, they just don’t care about real people. They pretend to. It’s their “righteous” banner than they hide behind. Just say you don’t know shit about boundaries and don’t focus your attention on things you enjoy and go. I’m not your parent.

Specifically, Antis–and the Evangelical Christians whose culture they are derived from–care about “children”, but the way in which they use it is as a dogwhistle for “innocence”, in the puritanical Christian “Biblical” sense.

In essence, the problem is as follows:

Evangelical American Christianity, being heavily influenced by Southern Baptism, has an equally heavy emphasis on sexual purity in conjunction with White Supremacy. Since Southern Baptism had to culturally evolve to legitimize and support a slave state, most of the social justice and charitable teachings of Christianity (and the intellectualist textual traditions of Protestantism) had to be thrown out in order to create that legitimacy.

But when you’ve thrown those out, you have very little left of Christianity left, and what evolved in its place was a fixation on sexual purity for white women, as almost the collective property of White Men, who had to be kept pure, separate, and ignorant in order to maintain their racial purity. One of the passages cherry-picked to support that culture was Jesus praising those who have the innocence of children. In context, he was praising those who have childlike faith, and following the dictates of the authority figures in their lives, but it was easily adapted to a message about sexual ignorance.

So you have this deeply entrenched culture that is invested in a structure where ideologically padlocking the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of their women* is required for the structure to perpetuate itself across generations. This is a structure where a woman having a right to choose who her sexual partners, what her gender identity and gender expression, or any other expression of personal sexual freedom is treated as an existential threat to that structure… because it is, if enough people followed suit. So they need to police it as strictly as possible.

(* yes, I know that this is a bioessentiallist and reductive viewpoint that reduces someone down to their assigned gender at birth… but that’s how they operate, and thus the statement is valid, but that’s a whole different direction for this discussion)

So one way in which this policing expresses itself is the age-old idea of “If they don’t know about X, they won’t do X!” as applied to sexuality and sexual activity. “Childlike innocence” is prized and held up as an ideal, where a child should be kept sexually ignorant until they are in a place where the social structure says that they can engage in sexual behavior–marriage, ideally, but at least full adulthood. This even shows itself in the language, where “innocent” is used as a full synonym for “child”.

But, say, if you’re sexually aware when you’re not supposed to be…

Then you’re not longer safe to keep inside of the structure. You’re a danger to the structure. And since you are no longer an “innocent”, then you are no longer a “child”… and that means that you’re free game to make into an example of (and thereby demonstrate the dangers of straying outside of the safe bounds of ignorance into dangerous knowledge).

So having a story that shows “children” with any form of sexual awareness before the structure says that they should have means that you have destroyed innocence… and those characters, and the one who took them astray, are free game to destroy, in order to safeguard the ignorance of the rest.

Vitani is not canonically gay. She’s a blank slate. Stop trying to force her being a lesbian onto content creators. Vitani being lesbian started when a real bigot opposed the Kiara x Vitani ship in the fandom. People are allowed to hc her as anything they want. You’re not doing anyone favors by bleaching the fandom with that toxic Twitter mentality.

obi-troll-kenobi:

- First of all, shippers do not “erase” anything by having ships that differ from canon. It’s not like they arrive at the studio and hold a gun to producer’s head to never show ship episodes ever again or change them to the ship they like. You can still enjoy your canon.

- Same goes for character’s sexuality. Fandom is a playground but it’s not stoping you from enjoying canon.

- However sometimes people say extremely rude shit to defend/justify their ship preferences. “it’s straight relationship”, “bihet” is fucking biphobic; “just confused”, “found the right person” is a homophobic mantra. Can we just enjoy our stupid cartoon ships without having to use rhetorics that hurt irl people everyday?

darkshrimpemotions:

I can’t stress enough how much the John Green debacle was an early example of how cancel culture and purity culture combine to make people feel righteously justified to engage in harassment.

John Green, during his time on tumblr, committed the heinous sins of…being neurodivergent and talking openly about it, earnestly interacting with fans in a very direct and unfiltered way, and writing about teenagers navigating first love and sexuality while he himself was an adult. The worst things he ever did were be a little cringe or misspeak, for which he was always prompt to apologize (often whether he really needed to or not).

Yet despite the former two being things tumblr claimed to love and the last one being true of 99.99% of YA authors, in this case a large segment of tumblr users steeped in the early 2010s resurgence of purity culture decided that these things were suspicious and predatory, and used that as an excuse to justify some truly awful behavior.

Which is really all that cancel culture is: the normalization and even celebration of the process of misapplying morality or ethics to dehumanize someone for the express purpose of justifying whatever pain and suffering you want to inflict upon them. Basically, deciding “this person is bad, so I am exempt from affording them basic respect and human dignity, and am allowed to cross any and all otherwise uncrossable lines in order to punish them without damaging my own moral or ethical standing.”

Contrary to popular tumblr lore, the infamous “cock monologue” was not the sum total of the harassment, or even the worst of it. Callout blogs issued long lists of “receipts” about how terrible John Green was, most if not all of which were either taken out of context or completely refutable. His works were torn to shreds by people who’d never read them, as evidenced by much of the criticism being obviously and blatantly counter to the actual contents of the books.

Not that it mattered. Once the John Green hate party reached a certain level of critical mass, it became less about who he actually was or what he’d done, and more about proving you were a good person by hating him. That’s the natural conclusion of cancel culture, after all: virtue signalling by identifying yourself in opposition to the cancelled parties. They’re bad, and I’m good, so I hate them! Or, more often: They’re bad, and I hate them, so I’m good!

Before it was over with, John Green had been accused, with no evidence, of being everything from a Nazi to a pedophile and subjected to hate mail and death threats. He eventually left the site for the sake of his own mental health, and because he no longer felt comfortable engaging directly with fans in the same way he once had.

Yet even now, with the benefit of hindsight, and even among those who ostensibly reject purity culture and condem bullying and harassment, very few on tumblr take what was done to John Green as seriously as it should be taken or condemn it as thoroughly as it should be condemned. Which I think is something we need to at least consider doing, given the increasing rise of purity and cancel culture online, and given the recent influx of professional creators eager to interact with fans on a more direct level than they have on other social media.

And my concern is not purely, or even primarily, for the Mike Flanagans and Lynda Carters of the world. I’m far more concerned, actually, for the small, independent or self-published creators in this space, and how much even a very small level of visibility gives too many people a feeling of carte blanche to engage in harassment.

I myself have less than 3k followers on here, a handful of popular posts, and zero notoriety or consequence outside of tumblr whatsoever, and I’ve been repeatedly told to kill myself for saying such innocuous things as “I don’t think censorship is the cure for the world’s evils” and “maybe learning the history of communities you want to participate in would be a good idea.”

Thankfully, all it took for me to stop the harassment that came my way was to block those few individuals. But there have been many instances over the years of small creators or just random tumblr users that got a bit popular being stalked, doxxed, swatted, and harassed to the point of leaving the site and dealing with serious mental health issues as a result. It has never been just John Green. John Green isn’t even the worst example. And tumblr has never learned its lesson.

forthegothicheroine:

juniperhillpatient:

“apologist.” “critical.” y’all are doing too much. when my favorite characters do evil reprehensible shit I simply don’t fucking care cause it’s not real

via @maddie-grove

#a while back i saw a whole thing about how we needed to acknowledge something bad a character did#and after a point i was like why? is he real? is he running for senator?

vaspider:

… yeah, that makes sense.