Fiction helps us understand with people other than ourselves, and wether consciously or subconsciously, antis, TERFs, fascists, and other such cultural puritans want to limit fiction in order to limit our empathy - both for the people around us, and for the people we’ve never met.
This turned into a proper ramble, sorry not sorry.
Works of fiction use fantastical tropes and traits to tell us real stories about ourselves. These stories often challenge our understandings and preconceived notions. Those underlying and “real” stories are WHY fascists, TERFs, and antis benefit from fans fighting over shipping or character drama. There are things we can learn about other people from their tastes in fiction, but it’s exactly the opposite of what antis, fascists, and TERFs want us to learn.
1: Works of fiction use fantastical tropes and traits to tell us real stories about ourselves.
Most of the stuff antis, TERFs, fascists, etc. clutch at their pearls about are usually relatively superficial to the stories they’re complaining about. Nine times out of ten, if you strip back the more fantastical tropes and traits of a story, the deeper story is far more real and relatable than meets the eye, or otherwise pertinent to a real world issue.
Look past the zombies of most popular zombie apocalypse stories, and you’ll see stories of mutual aid, found families, and building community even admidst a world of strife (Walking Dead, Last of Us).
Peel away vampires and werewolves in popular paranormal dramas and you’ll find stories about relatable romances (Twilight) or mental health and trauma (Teen Wolf).
Fans might flock to superhero movies for the cool superpowers and action scenes, but they stayed for the multidimensional examinations of fatherhood and family (Marvel movies) or interrogations of the role of centralized power in public life (Marvel comics).
Look underneath the stories about magic and monsters and you’ll find stories about recovering from trauma and trying not to pass that onto the next generation (The Witcher), dysfunctional family dynamics (Supernatural), or tensions besides desire and duty (Merlin).
Before its flaming implosion, one of the most popular fantasy series on television might’ve gained attention for its magic, dragons, and gore, but it stayed in our collective attention because of its takes on the personal, the political, and the relationships between the two (Game of Thrones).
Meanwhile, the high fantasy movie series that still remains one of the most popular of all time is a story of survival of one’s friendship and one’s self through overwhelming trauma (Lord of the Rings).
The two most popular science fiction franchises in America both came out of the gate with political statements that took a firm stance amidst the greatest political controversies at the times of their inceptions (Star Wars and Star Trek).
The globe’s most popular low-fantasy franchise was such a strong denouncement of bigotry and bias that even when its creator turned out to BE a bigot and biased, fans stuck to the lesson that the fiction taught us and turned our backs on her (Harry Potter).
2: These stories often challenge our understandings and preconceived notions.
More and more, these underlying stories are challenges to how we view the world or what we presume to be true. At the height of the Cold War, Star Trek refuted the narrative of capitalism being the only path to a thriving society, while Star Wars demonstrated that city/world-destroying weaponry was inherently imperialistic no matter how much you dressed up its ownership in veneers of democratic governance. In a culture that romanticizes the ideal of a father as a protector and collectively assumed that being a good person and being a good parent are the same thing, The Last Of Us challenges that very notion by pitting the two against each other. In an era with increasing awareness of and sympathy towards exploitative abuse, intergenerational trauma, and mental illness, Teen Wolf took the surprisingly controversial stance that revenge resolves nothing, and being a victim will not absolve you of the pain you cause others.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. The idea that fiction could challenge and even undermine the preconceived notions established by real world institutions and oppressors is what drives so much of the book-banning, censorship, and yes fandom puritanism. It’s not that shipping drama is really about Protect The Children™ Hysteria; it’s that shipping drama AND Protect The Children™ Hysteria are both about the fear that what you think you already know about the world may not be right - and may even be actively wrong. No one likes being wrong and no one likes being afraid, and this is a combination of them both.
3: Those underlying and “real” stories are WHY fascists, TERFs, and antis benefit from fans fighting over shipping or character drama.
Superheroes as a genre have always been a conversation between the American public and our relationship with state powers like the military and the police. Marginalized Americans have always been cognizant that these powers were not here for us. The fantasy of kind and just individuals using powers unique to them to combat the complacency and oppression from state powers was borne from that awareness, and adapted over the decades to new iterations of the same old problem. This dialogue about the role of state violence in direct and indirect oppression of marginalized minorities, and non-state power against oppression, is dangerous for fascists - which is why they would vastly prefer public attention be on interpersonal dramas, ship wars, and private relationships. Who cares about the sanitization of the role of state violence in the accural of wealth? People ship Tony Stark with Peter Parker and that’s gross! People keep giving Batman the wrong girlfriend and they’re wrong!
Regardless of whether or not Across the Spider-verse’s Gwen Stacy is specifically and canonically a trans girl, her narrative is one heavily interrelated to trans experiences. If you can empathize with how being her true self nearly cost her her relationship with her father, you can empathize with someone whose gender expression risks their relationships with their parents. If you can empathize with her pain that her father associates her existence with the loss of a prior child, you can empathize with every trans person whose parent has told them that coming out as a different gender felt like the death of the child they had before. If you can empathize with her desperation to be included in something, how much of yourself you have to suppress or cut away to satisfy increasingly conditional inclusivity, and the necessity of needing to create your own group to belong in, then you can empathize with the experience of so many trans and queer people who went through something similar when heternormative society never had a place for us. It is because of all this that TERFs and transphobes kick up a fuss about whether or not she is canonically trans. After all, if people are too busy fighting over whether or not Gwen Stacy is trans, they are less likely to recognize all the elements of her story that are fantastical iterations of trans people’s real lived experiences, and thus are less likely apply the empathy they had for the fictional character to real people with similar struggles.
I’ll be the first to complain at length about the racism in the Teen Wolf fandom - indeed, for many people, I was the first person/a post I wrote was their big turning point. However, that’s a controversy about the Teen Wolf fandom; when it comes to the show itself, the biggest controversies all really boiled down to, “Whose pain is legitimate? And whose pain is NOT legitimate or even actively deserved?” And the rhetoric used in people’s justifications were increasingly close to real world rhetoric used to devalue the experiences of marginalized minorities and prop up the private agonies of cis white men and other people in demographics of power or majority. THAT was the reason why the “character/ship” drama exploded in that fandom. The fandom had to reject the show’s messaging, main characters, and main point, because to not do that while participating in the fandom was to accept its implicit message that the pain and suffering you’ve experienced does not justify the pain and suffering you cause, and your trauma does not make you the center of everyone else’s world. The characters’ sexualities or ships were largely secondary to this deeper, underlying story that challenged certain fans more deeply than whatever ship or character they hated the most…but the characters’ sexualities and ships sure made for a great distraction, didn’t it? How many people even know that Teen Wolf is about mental health and trauma in the first place, let alone the stances it took on those things before executive meddling kicked in for the last third of the show?
4: There are things we can learn about other people from their tastes in fiction, but it’s exactly the opposite of what antis, fascists, and TERFs want us to learn.
The fleeting thought that sent me on a spiral writing this essay in the first place was, “I’d shudder to see what they’d make of my father’s favorite Netflix show.”
My dad was functionally cut off from his family at the age of 10 and sent off to an abusive military school. He happened to get a great education there, and a lot of opportunities opened up to him because of it, but it came at the cost of perpetually feeling isolated and alone, trying to make his own way in the world when he left that school, and spending much of his early adulthood living out of a suitcase and having to hustle just for single meal to eat that day.
Fast forward half a century.
Netflix puts on a show whose first few episodes are just like that: the main character is very young, without family, in an institution that was supposed to take care of them but is hostile and stifling of their creativity; they get the opportunity to leave, but it is hard; their whole life is packed into a suitcase as they have to hustle for basic fares and food; and even once they get taken to a new family and forge new friendships, their upbringing has a lasting impact on their ability to build a new life for themselves.
I have a lot of issues with my father, and there’s a reason I’m low-contact with him, but I am not without empathy for him or sympathy for his past, and even after knowing him my whole life, this new Netflix show - which I personally cannot stand but he adores - genuinely gave me new insight into his psyche, one that I truly believe may help me mend my relationship with him going forward, or at least make coping with our existing troubled relationship a little easier. There are things about him which I still have to learn, and this story helped me learn them.
How cool is that? How wonderful is it that so much healing and bonding can be had over a TV show? One based on a book written over a hundred years ago, no less! That’s even cooler! How amazing is it that a children’s novel can have such a lasting impact that over a century later, it can still help people and families heal?
Social dividers would never see that, and indeed actively fear that. “Social dividers” is how I describe fascists, antis, TERFs: anyone who wants people to stay apart from each other, anyone who wants everyone to divide the world into “us vs them” just like they do, anyone who both lacks empathy of their own and cultivates its absence in others.
For their own varying reasons, all of them would just hear, “Sixty-five year old Indian man’s favorite show on Netflix is Anne With an E” and scream “PEDOPHILE!”
The idea that an Indian born and raised in a city on the other side of the planet from a white person born and raised in rural New England is a direct challenge to the ethnic divisions of the fascists’ worldview. Fascists cannot accept that some human experiences transcend geography, race, and ethnicity, and more importantly they cannot let anybody else accept it, either.
The idea that a man can have experience with traumas very similar to a girl is inherently contradictory to transphobes’ ideology that masculinity is inherently the source of all feminine trauma. For TERFs and conservative women especially, so much of their transphobia is misplaced rage at patriarchy and men in their lives being directed at other women, and to accept that men are perfectly capable of empathizing with women’s experiences is to accept that the men in their own lives are simply choosing not to. That’s why transphobes not only cannot accept a man and a girl sharing similar trauma, they cannot let anyone else accept masculine empathy, either.
The idea that a child of a dysfunctional parent can look at a story and look at the parent that caused so much strife in her life and say, “I get it,” is vehemently contradictory to the needs of so many victims in fandom who absolutely must divide the world into perfect parents and abusive parents. The idea that one’s own trauma could manifest as turning you into a traumatizer of others, and the idea that a victim could say, “regardless of my forgiveness, I appreciate having this greater understanding,” is a direct threat to their division of the world into “victims” and “victimizers” with no overlap between them. To accept that feeling like or being a victim does not preclude you from being someone else’s victimizer means accepting that you could become a victimizer, and therefore lose your perceived license to mistreat others - which is why antis not only cannot accept this idea, they can’t allow anyone else to accept this, either.
Works of fiction use fantastical tropes and traits to tell us real stories about ourselves: the tropes to simplify a story down to its core elements and then the traits to exaggerate them.
These stories often challenge our understandings and preconceived notions: by making us questions the characters and their choices, implicitly questioning our own character and our own choices.
Those underlying and “real” stories are WHY fascists, TERFs, and antis benefit from fans fighting over shipping or character drama: because that means we’re all distracted from the deeper meanings that challenge their ideologies.
There are things we can learn about other people from their tastes in fiction, but it’s exactly the opposite of what antis, fascists, and TERFs want us to learn: namely just how empathetic most people can be, and how the things we share vastly outweigh the things we don’t.
Antis, TERFs, and fascists have different ideologies, but all share the desire to not only divide the world into simple binaries, but make everyone else do it, too.
And nuance in fiction and fandom is a direct challenge to both of these goals.
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