A simple plea: Neurodivergent and mentally ill people… please try to meet others halfway. Don’t try to force everyone else to have to accommodate you with zero effort on your part to try to accommodate them in return.
And, no, “It’s my special interest” is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card when you abuse or harass or bully someone. Neither is “you can’t judge me because I have a disability”. You’re still a person and you have agency in how you choose to act.
Yes, it can be hard, especially given that emotional self-regulation is never formally taught and it’s a hard skill for anybody to learn, but if you at least try to understand the other person and recognize that they are another person, it will help so very much.
And the context for this?
In the last six years, since I started publishing my epic fanfic, I’ve been stalked. I’ve been impersonated. I’ve been harassed. I’ve been generally treated as A Machine That Dispenses The Special Interest And Needs To Be Whacked When It Malfunctions.
Occasionally, this has gotten to the point of hilarity; I recently had two people get upset that I wasn’t including their specific historical Special Interests and their specific subtype of queer representation, and going to ridiculous lengths to stalk and harass me for it… but they never even talked to me directly about their issues despite opportunities to do so.
And that’s just one example of many; I had another person impersonate me and tried to use me as a vehicle for his own works. Another demanded attention and praise anytime he said anything, and threw tantrums and guilt trips if he didn’t receive it, a pattern he shared with several others. Still another threw slurs for “discussion” to try to provoke people. Another was a liar and a plagiarist who didn’t care who they hurt so long as they got what they wanted. And so on and so forth.
And each of them basically said that I was bullying them, or that I couldn’t judge them because it’s their Special Interest, or their mental illness or neurodivergence… but it was clear that they were just using that as a shield to hide from consequences.
But just imagine if they’d been willing to talk with me, instead of at me? If they had treated me as someone to engage with, instead of Demand [Content/Praise/Adulation/Their Wants] From?
Well, the people who have made that effort seem pretty pleased with the outcome.
Hey, let’s talk about anons like this, because I know some people haven’t been in a position to see the patterns these play out in on broader scale and may indeed not spot the trap.
And it is a trap.
An ask like this has several purposes.
First, it uses social justice language in passive aggressive and manipulative ways to try to coerce a behavior. In this case, the desired behavior is usually for the recipent to participate in community shunning and/or harrassment. The language above is intended to put the recipient on the defensive where, in the haste to disassociate themself from the Bad Thing, they quickly disassociate themself from the bad person, often with no particular fact checking or evidence.
The message is also intended to create a sense of being surveilled and judged by an unknown amount of people with unknown amount of social power and an unknown amount of relevance to your life.
Notice that these asks are usually framed as if they are coming from a follower or potential follower, someone who is addressing you personally and who cares about your opinion and who your blog has an effect on. However this is usually…. very much not the case. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to watch a gossip campaign from like this from the outside, you will very quickly notice that messages like this get sent in mass batches to dozens and dozens of strangers. (You can often turn these up with a tumblr search, if you look.)
The sender does not know you and probably does not follow you. They have a person they don’t like (possibly for their stated reason and possibly not), and they are going through the reblogs of a post from that blog and mass messaging *everyone* with a form letter. They will not see your response and they will probably never even see your blog again.
Which brings us to the second goal of whisper campaigns like this:
Notice that I blacked out the names above? That’s because when the recipient answers anonymous asks like this, they provide a platform for the opinion on their blog. An anonymous message like this that gets posted doesn’t just spread gossip and apply pressure to the recipient, it is spread to the recipient’s entire community.
The *goal* is to get access to your community. The *goal* is to use you as a soapbox.
Is the information accurate? Did anyone check? Does the anon have an ulterior social motive? BIG SHRUG
If you go into the comments on one of these whisper campaigns you will see that *most people never bother to check.*
They assume good faith from a follower, they’re off balance defending themselves, and they jump straight to conciliation.
It’s a really, really effective form of social manipulation, and really really commonly misused.
This is what bullying on social media can look like especially in left-leaning/social justice minded circles. This is how otherwise caring people get roped into participating in harassment campaigns.
Reposting stolen art from png sites found on Google, badly editing fan art. When confronted, they play dumb. Told one person they were annoying and then watched them. Told me they blocked Kaisertiger as their excuse to go ahead and steal their art. Feels like a troll account.
Antis: “Seeing triggering media can scar a person so badly they never, ever go on the internet again! You’ve robbed them of their only coping mechanism! You should feel awful for making somebody not want to come online any more just because you don’t care about them! ”
Also antis: “You however, deserve to feel too afraid of harassment to come online any more, because I think fiction is the same as reality.”
People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”
Whenever I have a bad day, this image makes it better. It’s nice knowing the creator of one of the best cannibalism shows (Hannibal) supports proship. He’s even got merch of it too.
“It speaks much more about your character then any of theirs…” Hah, just reading it aloud makes me happy.
I’m not even proship, but seeing him support the movement against censorship in fiction? That’s just a relief. Knowing that even celebrities and public figures support things going against Antis? So nice… It’s comforting in a weird way.
