After seeing multiple creators having to publically out themselves or reveal past traumas in order to get fans to stop yelling at them for representing a certain minority/concept in fiction, can yall learn to take a second to consider how your words and actions affect others? Especially in fandom spaces? By demanding that people can only talk about certain issues if they’ve personally been affected by them, you are directly forcing people to reveal their trauma/minority status.
This was prompted by fans’ response to the latest episode of a TMA featuring substance abuse, but also remember a few months ago when Jameela Jamil was cast to play a queer woman in an upcoming movie and there was so much backlash that she had to come out as queer? That fucking sucked.
^^ and the same thing happened with Keiynan Lonsdale from Love, Simon?
#hot take–‘you’re not x so you can’t write x’ is bad praxis#if you can’t find something actually wrong with the actual portrayal#maybe take a step back and ask yourself if perhaps your trauma is getting in the way of you’re enjoyment of the media#which is a totally valid but SEPARATE issue from creators being bigoted (via @dinosaurrainbowstarfish)
Few days ago I saw a post from @ao3commentoftheday about absolutist writing advices, and while everyone agreed that it was awful and only served to stifle creativity, @brownian-notions had an explanation that I feel overlapses with the current subject. (link to the post : https://brownian-notions.tumblr.com/post/621916167829864448/um-so-am-i-the-only-one-who-finds-very)
They said that absolutist writing advices were corrupted versions of more nuanced lessons. Like “this is a common practice” becomes “you must do this”, or “this can be problematic and should be done with caution” becomes “you must never do this”.
In the case of that absolutist take “if you’re not [X] you can’t write [X]”, I think the initial message was something like “If you want to write [X] you should research the subject deeply because [X] is subject to many negative cliche and if you don’t research it you will just create another rock to add to the mountain of discrimination”, along with “the best way to research [X] is to talk to [X] because they know best what they are facing and how they would like to be represented”.
Those are both very important and good advices. It requires time and energy to actually put into practice, so I understand the anxiety of seeing someone unrelated to a subject trying to represent that subject. But if the colossus of Greed that we call Disney have been able to put this time and energy in the research before making Moana and Coco, then everyone can. We should demand accurate representations, but we also have to trust creators in their ability to research topics they may be unfamiliar with.
