How fandom fucked me up and got me abused
People often say fiction doesn’t effect reality, when defending their “controversial” ships. Firstly. This is complete and utter bullshit as you can find with a quick google search.
Secondly, I want to add in with my own personal experience as to how fiction and fandom was used to lure me into specific mindsets and allowing my abuse.
HEAVY TW FOR ABUSE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT OF A MINOR
When I was 12, I came out as bisexual to a close friend, who we will refer to as L. L, at the time, identified as a girl but has since come out as a trans boy. I will be referring to him with he/him pronouns but I feel it’s important to keep that at the time we believed we were in a same sex relationship. I believe L was 14 at the time (he was one grade above me but a little older for his grade and I have always been one of it not the youngest in my grade due to my birthday.)
L and I had first become acquainted through school and became friends due to shared fandom interests, at the time this being Hetalia. (I could write a whole essay on why Hetalia is bad alone in its effect on people, but that’s not the point. Also I was 12 and didn’t realize it.) After about a year after meeting was when he asked me out and I happily accepted. During our relationship, he also introduced me to Homestuck, which I then became a fan of.
As our relationship continued, we both got very into very roleplay, usually of our favorite ships, most of these being ones L liked that I just liked for him. The important ones to this story being Dirkjake, Dirkhal, Johnjake, and Erisol. With Johnjake, this was a very sneaky way to get me to ship incest. I had not, at the time, realized it was incest. Dirkhal was something I was uncomfortable with, but he pressured me into roleplay with it.
The dynamics between Dirkjake, Dirkhal, and Erisol are... Uncomfortable, to think of now. Dirkjake, as a relationship, canonically failed because it was toxic, and when I read it I was upset they broke up despite how obviously toxic it was. I couldn’t read it as that, because of L. With Dirkhal, it was always roleplay as incredibly passive aggressive between us (the few times I gave in to his begging to roleplay it). Erisol was always roleplayed incredibly aggressive, like how they acted to each other in canon (the characters hate each other.)
These dynamics were romanticized- possessiveness, jealousy, and aggression towards your partner. Then in other fan media I consumed, I found the romanticization of the taking of innocence, of relationships between a caretaker type and the person they were taking care of, of someone incredibly possessive over their partner, of specific types of abuse that made it so much harder for me to realize I was being abused. This was all stuff introduced to me by fandoms, by fanfiction, whether through my own internet usage, or my abuser showing them to me.
I was also drawn into this idea that because it was a “gay” relationship, it was better and more pure than a “hetero” relationship. I was told gay people weren’t abusive. And I believed that.
Fandom taught me these things were okay. Fandom taught my ABUSER these things were okay. So despite how bad it made me feel, how isolated from my family I felt, I thought it was okay. I was the younger one, I told myself this was how relationships were supposed to work because this is how fandom taught me and how my abuser taught me they were. I was inexperienced and I easily swayed because I was a child. Remember, I was a 12 year old when this relationship began. I was 14 when it ended. It was my first relationship. I had no clue how this shit was supposed to work.
Even after the relationship ended I didn’t realize how bad it was. I had found by then it wasn’t good because I saw a post on tumblr warning me about red flags in a relationship and I noticed some of them lined up with L. But even then I didn’t know it was as abusive as it was. It wasn’t until about four years later that it hit me.
Through the romanticization of the dynamics between those relationships, from all the fanfiction, and the fan content, I had gotten abused horrifically. He used this in roleplay, and in our overall relationship, to gaslight me, to abuse and then lovebomb, to excuse himself, and to sexually assault me. He used roleplay to push me into sexual situations I was uncomfortable with (again. I was 12/13/14 during this relationship) and this was an action that was played off as “cute” or “romantic.” He was my “first” in so many things and he loved to coo over my inexperience and lack of knowledge of these things. My childishness was seen as cute. How is this not creepy?
To this day I have trauma. It’s been years but even as I’m typing this out I’m getting itchy and shaky and my chest hurts. I still see L sometimes and every time I do I’m reminded of what he did to me. And he did more outside of fandom too- he tried to ruin my life and tell my friends I cheated on him (I didn’t). I was taken advantage of in so many different ways, because of my introduction to fandom spaces, and the rampant romanticization of abuse in fandoms. I’m not trying to promote “purity culture” or whatever I’m trying to protect vulnerable young kids who are like I used to be, from the situation I was in. My relationship with my mother has never fully recovered. My mental health has never fully recovered. I still have nightmares about him. My relationship with myself is still skewed, and I’m still a fucking doormate because that’s what I was turned into.
Anyway this post is a mess because I can’t fully coherently talk about L, but long story short?
I won’t sit back and let you ship what you want and romanticize what you want. If I can save even one little kid from what I went through, then it’s enough. Fuck you and fuck your ships.
And if any of you pro ship fuckers come on here to complain, you get blocked immediately. I don’t want to hear you defend yourselves on a post where I’ve just told you I was assaulted because of your rhetorics. Fuck you
