Fandoms Explained

Explaining how fandom works like I wish someone had done for me as a kid. Please feel free to send an ask! || Cosmos(they/them)

[aniseandspearmint]

I feel like I need to say this, as I've seen some concerning fandom purity bullshit crossing my dash.

This blog is unapologetically pro AO3.

I support them and all they do, may they continue to do it for decades to come.

[thorne1435]

Big Spoon or Little Spoon

Big Spoon

Little Spoon

No Opinion/never cuddled/see results

Voting ended onSep 16, 2024

[fandoms-explained]

A thing I think a lot of people don't realize, both in fandom and among content creators themselves, is that with fiction there's this agreement between the author and the audience - they've released that fictional content to the public, which means they've opened themselves up to any interaction with it, including fan works of all kinds. But they also don't have to view that interaction - meaning if you want to write fic of an author's characters, go for it, they can't stop you, and if they try it's a bit of a dick move - but you also shouldn't send it to them on twitter unless they say it's okay, you know?

This doesn't apply to content creators who make nonfiction content, like a lot of YouTubers. Their content is their product; the people themselves are not a part of that. Making let's play videos on YouTube is not consent to ship people. Doing so can strain relationships between content creators and make things weird between otherwise good friends.

With roleplay where people are playing characters who aren't explicitly themselves, this is fully fictional content and the same agreement applies as above. When it's something like, say, the Dream SMP, where the characters are largely very similar to the people playing them, it's a little different. By declaring them a separate character from themselves, content creators are making the same agreement - but if it's not a sure thing, err on the side of caution, and if they declare boundaries, you stop. You can write c!Ranboo and c!Tubbo in fanfiction as being in a relationship and raising a child together, because that's canon. You shouldn't draw Ranboo and Tubbo cuddling, because Ranboo has said he doesn't know if he's okay with it. It's on a more case by case basis.

Tl;dr: the limits on fan content for fiction are far less stringent than on fan content for nonfiction. You can make as much content for fiction as you want, as long as you're not pushing it into content creators' faces without their consent. Don't make content about real people unless they've explicitly given permission. If it's a grey area assume you don't have consent until proven otherwise.

[batsandboba]

curious to see whether sadist’s passerine vid will change popular/cc perception of fanfic. cause you know they’re gonna watch it. will it make them curious about the source material? will they brush it off? will they seek the fic out? is it destined for heat waves fame, ie ccs openly admitting to reading it? im scared yet enthralled

[smallplaceinthecosmos]

YES I’M SO EXCITED FOR HOW THIS WILL AFFECT THE WAY THE MCYT FANDOM AND FANDOM AS A WHOLE VIEWS FANFIC VEE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND

SAD-ist is the fanartist in the mcyt community. She’s getting her own fucking Youtooz. And she’s choosing to make an animatic of a fanfiction - one of the best-written ones I’ve ever seen, and one entirely devoid of ships and most of the tropes fanfics are known for. A lot of people, ccs especially, have a very biased view of fanfiction as a concept (which I mostly see from how Tommy and Tubbo make fun of and express discomfort with it, but I heard about Quackity’s stream where he read poorly written Wattpad fics in front of a live audience…oof), mostly due to lack of exposure - even the members of the Dream Team who are comfortable with it largely focus on NSFW and ship fics when they discuss it.

Fanfiction doesn’t get as much respect as fanart does nowadays when it comes to ccs and fandoms alike - but if people see SAD-ist’s animatic, if they read the fic it’s based on? It could change the attitude toward fanfiction entirely in a lot of circles, and not just among the mcyt fandom - as big as this fandom is, those people are going to take what they learn about fanfiction in this fandom and spread it to others. The entire atmosphere surrounding the perception of fanfiction both in and outside fandom circles could be enormous, all because of this one animatic.

I could not be more excited.

[batsandboba]

TRUE. TRUE. it’s really exciting!! but it does mean more of the, uh, “gentrification” of fandom? for lack of a better word? the normalization of stuff that’s considered cringe and weird? which, don’t get me wrong, isn’t a bad thing, especially when it means more open minds and more acceptance of the “weird” things that often go hand in hand with young, minority, lgbtq+ online cultures. but in a way it also feels antithetical to the idea of fandom? fandom is fandom because it’s niche. most people over the age of 30 don’t even know what the word fandom means. it’s like memes. once companies and advertisers realized memes were what people were into and started trying to use them in marketing, they lost their point. and the internet scoffed and started making new memes that are constantly shifting so it’s almost impossible for a brand to get clued in to the culture enough to market with it.

i think i’m veering away from the original topic here so just fyi, i’m not calling sadist a brand or anything, i think it’s wonderful she’s making something for passerine and as long as the author doesn’t mind, if passerine heralds changing perspectives on fanfic, that’s wonderful. but as someone who’s read fanfic since my tweens, when it was the most mortifying thing you could admit to, the normalization kind of feels like.. being dragged into the light. what happens when Nike makes an ao3 account to appeal to gen z? that’s an extreme example but that’s kind of what worries me. idk.

but I don’t want to sound like a negative nancy - i’m absolutely hyped about the possibility of ccs recognizing fanfic as a legitimate art form and no longer belittling writers. I’ve made a post before about how I think tommy would honestly love a lot of the fanfic out there. it’s just a lack of awareness, accessibility, and negative stigma that prevents fanfic from getting the appreciation it should get. an artist spends hours on a painting or animation and can get a (100% deserved) like or comment from their favorite ccs, but an author who spent days writing a novel won’t ever get that and it breaks my heart.

[smallplaceinthecosmos]

The great thing about mcyt is that the content creators are pretty much on the same level as the fans - they don’t have any more inherent power than we do, they don’t have the power of a big company or a bunch of executives for or against them. I think mcyt is the perfect fandom for normalizing fanfiction because there’s not really anyone to gentrify anything, so to speak.

Fanfiction really is just a new sort of folk tradition - capitalism put all these barriers on making stories and some ladies who liked Star Trek in the 60s just looked at that and said “no thank you, we’re making this thing ours now,” and the internet makes that so much easier than it used to be when participation in fandoms was relegated to being on a mailing list or in-person meetups. If brands started getting involved in fanfiction, started sucking the soul out of it, then it wouldn’t be fanfiction anymore - and people would move on, start over somewhere else.

AO3 truly is a masterpiece, and I think it would be very resistant to any attempts by larger companies to take over our spaces - it’s living proof that the gentrification of fandom can be resisted, has survived the test of time and will do so again. Having more people involved in the world of fanfiction is super exciting, and we can survive anything that comes with “being dragged into the light.” It’s happened before, and even if it’s on a bigger scale this time, we’ll get through that as well, if and when it comes.

[batsandboba]

ahhh yea that makes a lot of sense! you’re right, mcyt is a great fandom for this because there’s no one “in charge.” the ccs write it but we can also influence the story just through our headcanons/art. it’s a collaborative project in so many ways, isn’t it. (and hey, you could probably make the argument that the dream smp is a type of fanfiction itself. the characters are extensions of the ccs and they’re just doing stuff they think is cool in a universe where they make the rules - does that not qualify as a self insert? pffffff)

anyways. I agree 100%. cosmo you are so smart thank you

[mharti-mcfly]

[cleo4u2]

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

[decepticonsensual]

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

[athenagray]

Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it.

[rainbowloliofjustice]

Fiction is a safe place to explore whatever fucked up or dark desire that you have. You can write the most vile and fucked up shit in fiction and it be absolutely nothing you desire in real life. You can write about a serial killer who gets away with it. You can write about someone who goes on moral crusades to purge the world of all evils and still be the protagonist. You can write anything in fiction because that’s what it is meant for. 

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isn’t meant to.  Is this inherently bad? No, but these people don’t just say “But this is my interpretation of it.” they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying “See? It means that they promote/condone xyz so they’re bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people who’ve actually committed acts of violence against other people.” 

[one-lonely-whumperfly]

THANK. YOU.

[fangirlofall]

@ all the people in the notes saying “yes except u can’t write about (list of immoral things they don’t want to see in fiction)” congrats on missing the point so spectacularly I’m not sure I could create better performance art if I tried

[moon-crater]

So, I have OCD. Responsibility/harm OCD, in particular. And guys, let me tell you, the hardline stance that having bad thoughts makes you bad is actively harmful to people like me. “Having a thought means you will act on it” goes against everything mental health professionals say and what mental health advocates stand for.

And you know, there are people who have it even worse than me? Religious OCD often focuses on achieving complete moral purity. P-OCD features fears of secretly being a pedophile. Postpartum depression features intrusive, frightening thoughts that sometimes drive new parents to suicide because of the stigma of having those thoughts. There are stories of people actually being investigated by child protective services because they shared their fears with an ignorant health professional who believed thought=action. Many abuse survivors with PTSD live in terror of becoming abusers themselves, and any errant negative thought that floats across their brain can frighten them into thinking they’re becoming monsters.

Perpetuating the idea that thoughts=actions makes it hard for people struggling with intrusive thoughts to reach out for help dealing with them. That makes mentally ill people live in unnecessary misery. It isolates them. Sometimes it even kills them.

Accepting and exploring bad thoughts is actually the basis of exposure and response prevention therapy for OCD. It’s literally part of the treatment for the illness. Discouraging that act, portraying it as evil, can be detrimental to recovery.

“Oh,” you might say if you’re guilty of this, “I don’t mean people like you with bad thoughts, I mean people who write bad thoughts!” Cool. Doesn’t fucking matter. People like me hear and internalize it. People who have these illnesses and don’t yet recognize that hear and internalize it; they may never get help because of it. You can’t lob a bomb at your enemy and un-kill all the bystanders caught in the blast. Not how that works.

Fandom needs to stop being so far up its own ass about fictional content that it’s becoming ableist. There are real world consequences for the ignorant ideas being pushed. Even if you don’t care about fiction as a tool for catharsis, even if you don’t care about the importance of art as free expression, even if you don’t care about censorship, you should still criticize this trend in fandom because it’s ableist as fuck. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[heroofthreefaces]

Transcription of the Miranda quote in the images:

“I find that, for me, the work is a safe place to put all the stuff you don’t want to put in your real life. I don’t want to be a crazy, manic asshole. I don’t want to have an affair. I don’t want to have a fucking gunfight. But! There’s a part of your brain that wants to experience everything, and so work’s a safe place to explore it all. Both in the writing and in the performing. I get to write about having an affair. I get to have the guilt and the feeling of that without having to fuck my life up. [laughs] Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts.”

[icannotreadcursive]

I feel like there’s needs to be, like, handbook for authors who post on Ao3 for effective metatext.

By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.

Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.

This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.

I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.

I think it would do fandom a lot of good.

[icannotreadcursive]

Good news, I’m writing it

[icannotreadcursive]

Update:

I’m at 9680 words, roughly 16 pages single spaced, with two or three sections to go.

[icannotreadcursive]

Update:

First draft done. 11,100 words, 29 pages with formatting

[icannotreadcursive]

The final draft is getting cleaned up right now. I’ll probably be figuring out how to post it tomorrow.

On which note, anybody know the best way to make a PDF available online?

[icannotreadcursive]

Okay it is done!

Go here for the PDF, or here to view the whole document as a tumblr post.

I recommend the PDF.

Related note: the post length limit on tumblr is apparently more than 13,000 words.

[mikkeneko]

Worth a read; even as a long-time fandom veteran I encountered things I didn’t know were in use, like the “& Related Fandoms” tags.

[dinosaurrainbowstarfish]

a writer who writes the most fucked up “dead dove: do not eat” problematic pairing and fully tags and warns for the content they create will always be worthy of more respect in my eyes than people who call others weirdos because of who they ship. This is because a writer who writes disturbing things but gives me plenty of warning about them has demonstrated, regardless of what happens in the fic, that they value the consent of real people, and that they value my consent to see such content and will always offer me the option to avoid or withdraw. On the other hand, a purity cultist who demands I explain my trauma and exactly why I might be drawn to dark content, regardless of whether they’re the purest fluff writer to ever write, has demonstrated a lack of respect for my boundaries and the attitude that they are entitled to whatever they want to take from me. 

There are a lot of things that bother me about purity culture, but I think the most disturbing is that it clouds the very definition of consent, and then teaches this confusing version (you must consent to deep dives into your trauma and how it affects you for the benefit of strangers who have already decided you’re a bad person, and not consenting to that automatically makes you an abuser, also no one can consent to reading or thinking about disturbing content ever because thinking about it means you want it irl) to young, vulnerable, and often traumatized individuals, thus making it harder to understand their trauma and easier for them to ignore the real warning signs of abuse (like demanding that you agree with the abuser otherwise you’re literally the worst and most harmful person ever) because it teaches that abusers only come in one type, and that all abusers are “nasty shippers”.

This is especially dangerous because real life abusers teach their victims that the abuse is happening because the victim is a bad, evil person. One of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD is literally “Places undue blame on themself or others for what happened”. Teaching traumatized people that consent is a luxury only “good” people are allowed to have is incompatible with support for abuse survivors. tl;dr a writer who tags “dead dove: do not eat” has demonstrated respect for the necessity of consent. A purity cultist who sends anon hate has demonstrated a lack of respect for consent. 

[dinosaurrainbowstarfish]

Yes, this absolutely does include people who write, read, or ship abusive pairings, explore abuse in their work, include rape or incest in their work, with or without “calling out” that content. This also includes writers who include that type of content in erotic work. Content like that that is tagged properly indicates that, regardless of what happens in the fic, the person writing it understands that their work could impact real people and that those real people deserve the chance to choose wether or not they’d like to see the fic. An author who tags their fic has demonstrated that they understand consent and the fact that everyone gets to consent or not consent to the content they’d like to consume, unlike a purity cultist who sends harassing and threatening messages with the intent to cause emotional or physical harm to the person they’ve decided is “bad”.  Furthermore, ANY ideology that allows its followers to harass and attack members of the “out-group” for the crime of “not following the rules”, where the rules are about how you speak or act rather than how you actually do or do not harm others, is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

[faranae]

This is such a spectacularly-phrased example. Kudos!

[rhube]

I’d like to go one further: when an author properly tags a fic and includes ‘dead dove: do not eat’, and someone rocks up to that fic and says ‘I know this says “dead dove: do not eat” BUT…’ that person is the one who sucks*. They’re not ‘worse’, because the author isn’t doing anything wrong.

They suck because they came to a fic knowing full well that it was full of all kinds of potentially triggering shit (because it was TAGGED) AND that the person writing the fic knew all that shit was problematic and that some things that are wrong IRL might not be explicitly criticised in the text (acknowledging that has as a precondition knowing those things are wrong IRL), and they still came to the author and wanted to be made to feel more comfortable about the content of the fic.

‘I know this says DD:DNE but will all the wrongs be righted in the end?’

‘I know this says DD:DNE but will all the people who do bad things be punished?’

‘I know this says DD:DNE but you still shouldn’t be writing this.’

These are all ways of saying ‘I saw that this fic contained a dead dove, and the author advised me it was not for eating, but I want to put it in my mouth anyway. I feel like you should make that a safe and hygienic thing for me to do. Will you?’ and the answer is ‘NO. IT’S NOT FOR FUCKING EATING.’

And if you can only conceive of fics as being for eating (where eating is whatever ‘pure’ form of reading the reader prefers) then not only should you only consume fics that are for eating, but you don’t have a right to know what the author is doing with the fic that isn’t eating.

It might be baffling to you. Much as it is baffling that someone would put a dead dove in a freezer. But they labelled it, and they told you not to eat it, and as eating is all you want to do, you should have left it alone and found something else.

You’re not entitled to a detailed exploration of an author’s trauma and expert psychological analysis about how and why people with certain traumas gravitate towards certain kinds of fiction to help them deal.

Nor are you entitled to know about the weird-but-harmless things that somehow get turned around inside people and become fetish fuel. Or why some things that for most people become nightmare fuel became fetish fuel for others. There are a tonne of thoughtful posts out there about why this happens, but they don’t have to be able to articulate any of that. Know why?

Because they fuckin’ told you it was gonna be weird, fucked up shit and that their exploration of that shit doesn’t entail condoning of that shit. They told you when they tagged it as ‘Dead Dove: Do Not Eat’ and they are as entitled to explore that stuff without judgement as you are not to read that stuff. You’re the one who isn’t respecting boundaries when you step into their comments and ask them to make something not intended for you safe for you.

You are, actually, the one violating them, and entering their space to make it unsafe.

*Note that this is very different to the person who sees a fic with that tag and says: ‘I’ve seen this tag before, but I don’t know what it means; can you explain?’ I don’t mind answering THAT question at all. I mean, the fic’s still gonna be tagged with all the other stuff, so the person should still know that if they don’t like those things they should avoid it. But not knowing what DD:DNE means is AOK and asking about it is the right thing to do if you’re not sure. The problem comes from saying ‘I KNOW you tagged this DD:DNE, but is there any chance that you could make it so that I could eat it anyway?’

[justintaco]

I really hate those stupids posts that are like:

“What about REAL monster girls??? Not just weird humans?? like real huge MONSTERS?? With giant sharp claws and big sharp teeth?? Where are those???”

You’re thinking of bestiality. You want to fuck a T-Rex.

[justintaco]

[viewtifulmarkovich]

If it passes the Harkness Test, I’m down.

[viewtifulmarkovich]

For the uninformed:

[randomitemdrop]

This isn’t an item or even a game mechanic but I think y’all know you need the Harkness Test at some point or another in most campaigns

[wumblr]

here’s my issue with the harkness test

[archdemoning]

[justsomeantifas]

people will be like “fanfiction writers!!! are everything”

and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.

im just saying. ao3 gets their money

those writers dont. lmao.

so whyre you making it about the writers when they could post pretty much anywhere huh? 😂 and youre only paying a website.

[justsomeantifas]

u ever consider they do it this way on purpose so the only people making money on their poorly designed website are the owners

👀

[prismatic-bell]

Have YOU ever considered it’s a volunteer-run website that’s a nonprofit and is incredibly transparent about where its money goes?

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

Or are you just being an asshole?

[ms-demeanor]

“poorly designed”

You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?

That is free to host fiction on as well as free to read fiction on and is a site with an incredible amount of traffic that runs exactly zero ads aside from occasional funding drives?

[riazendira]

As a person with a law degree, can I just tell you how vitally fought and precariously won the ability to even HAVE Ao3 is!? And how a lot of that balance rides on it being a non profit that no one makes money off of? And how very much Ao3 does with how little $$$? (To the point where I mentioned the site traffic to a web developer friend and he honestly couldn’t see how the site could even exist because in his world to make it would cost so much and require so much work that it blew his mind that Ao3 even existed with the functionality, traffic, and utter lack of budget compared to what he usually worked with!)

Some days you kids today make your dearest rum aunty wanna beat her head against the wall. I swear to dog.

[jabberwockypie]

Fanfiction has to be free to survive.

It’s not a matter of “Oh, without that dastardly AO3, fanfic authors would be free to make money off of other people’s intellectual property″ and framing it that way is disingenuous.

The way copyright law and Fair Use work right now - the way legal precedent stands in the US, at this time - the only thing stopping Disney from swooping in and suing someone for writing Steve/Bucky fanfiction is that nobody is making any money off of it.

Is it fair that it works like that? Possibly not, but that’s not actually the argument at hand! That’s the way that copyright law works right now. And before AO3, anyone who wrote or hosted fanfic online was in danger of randomly getting a C&D one day - and most people don’t have the money or resources to fight that.

It happened. A lot.

And it wasn’t just porn! I know the anti-AO3 people like to frame it that way, but it has also happened to stories without any smut at all, just because the person or company holding the IP felt like it.

[lynati]

Nobody is making money on the site. Not the people who founded it, not the people who coded it, not the people who wrangle tags for it. Notice that there’s not a SINGLE add on the site. Money isn’t being made every time someone loads a page or hits the “next” button, unlike many other sites out there. There’s no fee to read, let alone a tiered structure to entice you to hand over a higher amount of money per month. If AO3 wanted to make money… well, then it would be shut down because the only reason it *legally* gets to exist is because nobody is profiting from it on any level. But if that wasn’t the case and AO3 really wanted to make money, there’s so many better ways they could do so than by a completely-option donation request a couple times a year?

I don’t know how you could spend any time at all in fandom and not know these things about AO3. Or miss the fact that they show EXACTLY where every dollar that comes in from their fundraisers goes to.

Like, do you even GO here??

[bitternest]

You could run the AO3 frontend off a couple of shitty Thinkcentres networked together for redundancy and haproxy in front of all of it. The site is extraordinarily light and the biggest challenge is load balancing it.  

AO3′s backend is… 

Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks. 

The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers. 

Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.

AO3 runs on blood, sweat, tears and some kind of Christmas miracle. So yeah, OP, go cry a fucking river. You’ll only fuel them. 

[junietuesday]

white people go like “is anyone going to redesign this nonhuman evil character as a poc?” and not wait for an answer

[junietuesday]

white people go “is anyone going to redesign this nonhuman good character as a white person?” and not wait for an answer

[junietuesday]

white people can rb but please do not clown

[junietuesday]

white people really cant give a shit abt anyone but themselves unless held at gunpoint or smth huh?

“what about the poor little white kids just trying to have fun?” what about the poor little kids of color made to feel unsafe and unwelcome in a space that was supposed to be fun?

“why can’t poc just make their own redesigns and we can keep these ones” why cant you realize that your actions have consequences and that you should maybe try to not enforce racist stereotypes??

like ofc its ideal to have VARIETY among both villains AND protagonists, its when your characters look like this

that the issue arises

scratch “can”, white people are encouraged to reblog

[yteicosanievilew]

“this makes me personally uncomfortable”, “this seems in poor taste”, “this is somehow harmful but presumably because you’re misinformed” and “this is actively malicious” are all different things. remember that

[vivaciousarcanist]

“this makes me personally uncomfortable”: the work has something that is awkward or triggering to someone, but nothing problematic “this seems in poor taste”: the work is fine, but it’s about something that maybe shouldn’t be joked about/the work has bad timing with the release lining up with a tradgedy similar to the events of the work like the episode tentacool and tentacruel from pokemon “this is somehow harmful but presumably because you’re misinformed”: the work unintentionally has some negative shit in it caused by a lack of knowledge, i.e. a cis person’s trans headcanons accidentally reinforcing negative stereotypes “this is actively malicious”: the work was made with the intention to cause harm

[schafpudel]

#this post needs to be mandatory viewing because the critique of work always being this black and white like… #‘the artist made a joke in poor taste therefore they are clearly an unapologetic violent fascist’ is like holy shit #please learn how to have a normal discussion  about problems without it being 0 to 100

[fullmetalfisting]

tbh tumblr and ao3 have subcultures that are impossible to explain to the average person. we all have bachelors degrees in nonsense discourse and certificates in fuckery. you think I can tell my irl friends “human pet guy reblogged my post and it’s upsetting” without explaining 5 different things? You think I can explain why I can’t watch Hamilton without thinking about the racefaking AIDS fanfic writer? I can’t unlearn this stuff. The neurological pathways in my brain are permanently rerouted

[seasaltcosmos]

we seriously need to bring back the concept of “despite its flaws i still enjoy it” instead of ‘cancelling’ every fuckin thing in sight 

[zoewashburne]

#we need to trust that just because someone loves a thing it doesn’t mean they don’t know it’s flawed

[cosmiagramma]

We also need to stop insisting that everyone enjoying flawed things must put 25 cents in the Problematic Jar and recite all its failings from memory.

[virtualcarrot]

If I just may add: we really need to stop pretending that “I’m a Good person, ergo the thing I like is PERFECT and if you criticize it you’re an ENEMY”. You can enjoy stuff AND keep your sense of critical thinking.

[gudetama-tamad]

[prokopetz]

The trouble with the whole projection-versus-fidelity-to-the-source-material discourse is that people keep trying to frame it as sort sort of moral issue, and it’s a lot more basic than that.

Projecting yourself onto a fictional character and using that as a vehicle for self-exploration is fantastic.

Projecting yourself onto a fictional character, then going about loudly insisting that everybody else is stupid and evil for basing their understanding of that character on the version that appears in the actual text rather than the version that lives in your head is a problem, but it’s not a problem because it’s morally wrong – it’s a problem because it’s annoying.

[moonlight-at-dawn]

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Because people confuse “critical as in critical thinking” with “critical as in criticizing something,” so they think that “look for something bad, no matter how far-fetched” is what “being critical” means.

[prismatic-bell]

They also don’t realize that “literary criticism” means…

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

What they THINK literary criticism means is, you take the clock apart and beat all the pieces with a hammer, then scream at it because it doesn’t tick for you the way it used to.

[izhunny]

OMG SOMEBODY PUT IT IN WORDS

[beggars-opera]

It’s all well and good to use “be critical of what you consume” to mean “don’t follow things blindly and acknowledge their flaws” but this mindset fails to take into account that everything has flaws. An unproblematic fave is just a fave you haven’t looked at from all angles yet. If you go through life like this hoping to find something morally pure to consume you’re just going to be miserable.

[businessbois]

yesterday’s stream is up on the vods channel, positivity time gamers, go go go

[lillian-nator]

[relaxxattack]

recently saw a post about how you can’t even watch the tommy pov dsmp youtube videos because of the amount of negativity in them and

now this one kinda makes me sad because tommy mentioned he reads through the vod comments since they’re the most important to him :/

i feel like the character arc he set up for c!tommy not only makes sense but is incredibly emotionally fulfilling (especially for victims of abuse). seeing it dumbed down to “tommy betrayed techno” and then badmouthed forEVER just seems... sad

(this isn’t me speaking for tommy or trying to say what he’s feeling; because obviously he’s his own person that im not friends with so that’s kinda WeirdChamp but. i, personally, just find it upsetting)

[fandoms-explained]

I see a lot of people in the notes who are getting very excited about making positive comments on Tommy's VODs now and I'd just like to say:

This is actually the perfect response, I think. Or as good as we can get, anyway.

I'm a big advocate for blocking and ignoring negativity in fandom, but sometimes you can't block and ignore people because their hate is not for you, it's directed at someone else, and that's still upsetting. So what can you do in this case? It's hard to ignore that sort of thing when it keeps piling up like that, so the best thing you can do is try to dilute it.

It is always worth it to post a positive comment on ccs' work. We mostly say this about fanfiction and fanart, here on tumblr, but it remains true for original content, especially those who are particularly well-known - they'll probably be getting more hate. So go post your multiple paragraph analysis post, your dumb little meme, your incoherent excitement. They do read it. Your comment might just make their day, you never know.

It is always worth it to put a little more positivity into the world.