What has your experience been like as a native t*rror fan?
IT SUCKS LOL NOBODY WANTS TO TALK TO ME cause i'm a fucking buzzkill and i don't like to leave discussions of colonization and colonialism and imperialism to nothing more than a disclaimer and a frowny emoticon. i actually don't think "obviously they're all bad people" is good analysis, i don't think any interpretation can hold up when all you say is "obv a huge part of this is the racism" when all anyone does is just name it and then proceed to side step and talk around it for the rest of time. in this fandom for all the literary analysis and cool shit it's like the actual damn themes of the show are the only things people DON'T talk about and instead write thousands of words on homosocialism and class struggle and military service and victorian values and will analyze and analyze every character But with the racism REMOVED. as if it's too serious (read: just not fun!!!) to be included in with everything else, instead of being the sole point of origin around which all characters in the terror are formed, around which every theme is developed, around which is the very foundational reason every white person gets away with saying "polar exploration" like they were fucking exploring anything, around which is the reason imperialists felt they had such a right to the rest of the world that they did it in the first place! and i don't like to be a buzzkill, recently on discord i've been eating my words a lot because i realize that i can sound so negative about the things i like, but it's because i like them that i am so so so critical of their flaws. and the show itself doesn't even mince words the way the fandom does, i love the way the show is written (and as always by gosh one day i will get my hands on a copy of the book but today is not that day) and it actually does so much that i dreamed it would. it isn't actually just "white navymen doing white navymen things and we don't question the politics of why they're doing those things" it's narratively centered around the question of what is a navyman and what is a colonizer and how do these men bring their victorian english royal navy society to a world that is just absolutely fine without it, and how do they all end eachother through nothing but their adherance to a structure that (like all structures, like all borders) is enforced by violence when they never had to Do All That in the first place? it's good! it's really good!! i'm writing an insane essay about personifications of imperialism in the terror right now! but the fandom somehow seems to have watched an entirely different show from me. i don't mind being fandom silly i like to ship characters and in fact the terror is far from the most imperial text on which i spend my time (hi, aubreyad! mwah!) and be very facetious with, i just also don't think that by treating the central themes of the show (without which all interpretation and analysis falls through because it is not founded first on anything) as Untouchable Topics because they're So Serious is actually doing us any favors.
and that is just my like, baseline level gripe is that i wish white people cared about racism more than they do. the most they can muster is saying they care, of course they do, and then proceeding to somehow forget that caring is a verb and an action and needs to actually be done for you to say you do it. this doesn't even MENTION the anon asks i've gotten since the first time i expressed this sentiment. i was told indigenous perspective on polar exploration literally Doesn't Matter and Isn't Needed beyond the oral history we already have - which i don't know if i need to spell it out but one of the most common ways people are unthinkingly racist to natives is to want our words and our bodies and our relics and our writings and our ideas and our medicine and our stories and our history, but they don't want them all together in one place being breathed life by US. they want to put them on their powerpoints and tell other white people about the fun facts they've learned, about a people who aren't here anymore, and goodness forbid there's one of us in the room, who dares to remind anyone that you're talking about actual people, and that it should be indigenous people who get to talk about their own damn culture first instead of having to give up space so some white person can speak on our behalf.
that's a specific message i got a while ago that really hurt me, because it was framed so good-faith as if the person was really truly genuinely just curious about what justifies native ppl speaking at all. i was being asked to justify even being part of the conversation at all, something i guarantee no white 20-something in this fandom has had to do. but beyond that i've gotten more outwardly racist things, slurs and insults and "you should have all been wiped out we need to try again" and such. that all is just part of online life for me at this point because i happen to think shutting up about racism is not actually a good thing, so i'm kind of honestly used to it, but it was that first message written in the same polite tone that many normal asks are, many analysis posts in the fandom and many normal conversations, but asking me to justify even being alive and talking in the same place as a white person, in a fandom dominated by white people talking to white people about a culture of white people that only exists because of imperialism and racism, was really something i don't know that i've gotten over yet.
i have to cut this off here cause i am busy in offline life but if anyone wants me to elaborate on any of this completely feel free to ask, i'm actually not mean, i just (incredibly) don't like experiencing racism
