This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrolâ said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now wouldâve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes itâs only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way itâs always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.Â
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings werenât unique 2) they didnât matter 3) they didnât matter because they werenât unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these arenât good stories, otherwise they wouldnât have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when itâs burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days Iâm a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when Iâve had a bad week. Iâm not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life donât go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if Iâd found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and theyâre only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? Thatâs disgusting, youâre disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings donât matter, they arenât unique, theyâre shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time thereâs no deity whoâs handing out second chances.
Maybe thatâs what bothers me most about all of this. Itâs the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but âyouâre wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANONâ is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when youâre young than âyouâre wrong for liking a ship because YOUâRE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS ITâS YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.â
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that itâs solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? Iâd also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like theyâve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.Â
Hey, câmon, calm down friends. I bet Iâve read a story thatâs got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. iâll delete this reblog if you donât want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts. Â
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
âAudience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.âÂ
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasnât for teaching specific lessons (donât do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters youâre watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesnât mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadnât foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes weâre citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain itâs easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesnât end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than heâd care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with âhubris is just prideâ i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
This. This. A quintilian times this.
I come up against this a lot. Having PTSD brain along with a host of other illnesses, when I see people empathizing with genocidal villains or trying to make out a character who has done or keeps doing terrible things isnt really that bad or misunderstood, a pit opens in my stomach and Iâm suddenly quite certain that these are terrible people who dont care about victims or what not. Itâs opening up even as I write this when I think about specific examples. It all boils down to - âhow can you possibly like this character or identify with them?â
The thing is that I like problematic characters too (but thatâs different). I also latch onto and determinedly ignore unforgivable shit theyâve done that crosses all my lines (out of character, bad writing) I also rehabilitate characters in fic who are irredeemable in canon (they wasted them, it didnt have to be that way), I also fantasize about dark Fifty Shades shit where my happy healthy canon OTP is in a deliberately exploitative, predatory dynamic which still somehow manages to be perversely loving (itâs just jerk off fantasy). And yet somehow I donât connect this dichotomy in my mind easily.
One of the worst things this site teaches the vulnerable, angry and impressionable is that we need to account for every taste, every desire and thought that we have. There was a time during the worst of my mental illness that I genuinely believed anyone who liked Game of Thrones was misogynistic, warped and immoral. Traumatized minds are prone to black and white thinking as a survival mechanism, but Tumblr culture makes sure to validate it and convince us that itâs rooted in reality. It wants us to believe that either society can be wrong or we can, and because society is obviously wrong then everything we feel must be right and moral. It conflates systemic issues (e.g: racist conditioning makes it difficult to empathize with non-white characters) with direct personal failing (they donât care about black and brown people at all). In doing so, it erases our humanity, where most of us are generally well-meaning but flawed and, while influenced by systemic social conditioning, also like and dislike and love and hate things for intensely personal reasons which most of us canât really articulate and shouldnât have to.
There are absolutely media and fic and fic writers and tropes that I abhor, not just because they are triggering to me (hate A/B/O but its not a moral judgement) but because they arent on the same moral page as I am (things that seem explicitly abuse apologist) And thatâs fine. I avoid them, bitch about them to my friends, discuss my issues with the subject in general terms while doing my best not to stir up Drama (which I donât always succeed in). But I think these are all reasonable reactions when living in a conflict-ridden world with other people. Unreasonable reactions would be âEVERYONE WHO LIKES THIS POST GETS BLOCKED!!!â âIF YOU SHIP THIS PAIRING YOUâRE A TOXIC PERSON!1!1!â âCIRCULATE THIS SELF-CARE BLOCK LIST OF EVERYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH ME!!!!â
Iâve actually done some of that shit in my long and storied career of being overreactive and judgemental in fandom, and lemme tell you, the first person it hurt was me. That thing about pointing with one finger making three turn back towards you is TRUE. When I positioned myself as a moral authority, I need to convince myself and others that I have the high ground. if I call other people into account, I need to be able to account for everything I like and think and say and feel. And I canât do that. I was socialized in the same flawed systems and even if I wasnât, as OP says, thereâs always going to be that shredding in my mind trying to harmonize with something else.
I just became more and more mired in anxiety that I wasnt feeling and thinking and doing the right things (what a terrible expectation of a very ill, lonely, traumatized girl) and I kept paring my own breathing space into a smaller and smaller circle, trying to be as Non-Problematic as possible. Itâs a little like being throttled by your own hand just so you can avoid being stabbed by someone elseâs.
Iâm still not perfect, still prone to PTSD brain and demonizing people unfairly and calling things out which I should let well enough alone. But I have learned the very valuable lesson to not mix progressive politics up with personal morality, to not stand as judge and jury over my own tastes or anyone elseâs as far as possible and to learn how to let awareness of social issues co-exist with mine and other peopleâs enjoyment of problematic things. Healing comes through acceptance and catharsis, not repression and punitive social justice.
âTraumatized minds are prone to black and white thinking as a survival mechanism, but Tumblr culture makes sure to validate it and convince us that itâs rooted in realityâŚ
Healing comes through acceptance and catharsis, not repression and punitive social justice.â
This comment is so important. This whole post is.
