#on antis

[its-not-fate-its-destiny]

Reminder that fanpol do not just target works that they consider to be immoral, but also things that they find weird, annoying, or just simply distasteful.

Fanpol do not make fandom a better place. They are not a community service that keep the "freaks and nasties" away from your favorite video games and TV shows.

They will go after anything in art that they don't take a liking to. I promise you that your own creations and preferences will not be an exception.

[aibidil]

Rick Rubin on art and censorship:

Art can’t be irresponsible. It speaks to all aspects of the human experience.

There are sides of ourselves that aren’t welcome in polite society, thoughts and feelings too dark to share. When we recognize them expressed in art, we feel less alone.

More real, more human.

This is the therapeutic power of making and consuming art.

Art is above and beyond judgment. It either speaks to you or it doesn’t.

The artist’s only responsibility is to the work itself. There are no other requirements. You’re free to create what you will.

You don’t have to stand for your work, nor does your work have to stand for anything but itself. You are not a symbol of it. Nor is it necessarily symbolic of you. It will be interpreted and reinterpreted in the eyes and ears of those who know almost nothing about you.

If there were anything you might stand for, it would be to defend this creative autonomy. Not just from outside censors, but from the voices in your head that have internalized what’s considered acceptable. The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be.

[every-dayiwakeup]

TikTokers saying "oh you love billy but hate argyle" uh what 😃

I've literally never met a billy fan who said anything bad about Argyle. I mean... I love both characters. This narrative is getting old fast.

I don't know where they got these ideas from, honestly.

So if you like... a fictional character... who happens to be a teenage ab*se victim... then you're automatically racist and/or homophobic?

If you want to really get into this, I think you mean IT character Henry Bowers, and he and Billy are not the same. The Duffers wanted them to be, but fortunately Dacre made sure that didn't happen.

You're forgetting that ST is literally a bunch of Stephen King references without substance or originality. The Duffers wanted Billy to be Henry Bowers. If you think Billy was bad, I suggest you read IT (the movies are available too in case y'all don't know how to fucking read).

[sharkfish]

when i was a kid, all books containing queer content were banned, most likely across the entire school district. this was not an isolated incident at the time (mid-late 90s). as a kid who didn’t yet realize i was queer, i devoured any of these books i could find from outside sources.

one of the big ones “think of the children” people were upset about was a little book called annie on my mind. the girls were in love, no doubt, but there was no sexual content***. they held hands and might have kissed (it’s been a long time since i read it), but absolutely nothing more than that.

and that was the greatest fear of adults. that kids might recognize themselves in girls who called themselves best friends but were also in love.

antis don’t remember how an attempt to “think of the children” led to just another generation who didn’t know anything about gay people other than the super flamboyant dudes you saw on queer eye for the straight guy and will & grace. that’s where we were my entire childhood. tom hanks was allowed to be smart and capable in philadelphia, but he also had aids, the “gay cancer.”

please don’t misunderstand me - i’m not equating queer content with underage or non-con content. but censorship bleeds, just like all forms of authoritarianism does. today we’re censoring content we find abhorrent, like underage stories including romance or sex. and then they ban content about disability and/or mental illness, because children should be protected from uncomfortable content. and then they ban content that discusses racism or other types of oppression. and then they ban content about queer characters of any stripe because, well, queer people are all perverts. fahrenheit 451, which teaches that censorship is wrong, is still banned in many places. they continue to ban books like judy blume’s forever... which depicts teenagers discovering their sexuality. 

(more under the cut, it got long)

and it keeps snowballing until there’s nothing left. gone is a song of ice and fire, which has many of the themes antis are against. gone is laurie halse anderson’s speak, which is a ya book about a teen girl who was raped at a party and her path to recovery. gone is the anthology about queer kids called am i blue? which changed my life. gone are the books i read as a kid about abuse and all the other terrible things we may encounter in the world. gone are all my favorite tv shows - firefly depicts violence, crime, and prostitution; friday night lights depicts teens drinking and having sex; the walking dead for obvious reasons; grey’s anatomy has queer characters, infidelity, and discussions of past trauma (that’s just a couple of things with the main characters, not to mention all the bad stuff that happens to patients); harry potter involves witchcraft, murder, and kids behaving badly. all of stephen king’s books are gone, especially the long walk, which sheds a negative light on authoritarian governments.

i’m not being hyperbolic. you don’t have to look very far into our past to see all of these themes buried, both in fiction and in public life. you don’t have to go very far back to find “auntie never married and has shared her home with a good [female] friend for the last twenty years” instead of “this is auntie and her partner/wife.” you don’t go very far back to find innocent books about teenage romance like annie on my mind banned from schools and libraries. antis do not have new ideas, but they have an easy way to tell fic writers to kill themselves since writers like grrm aren’t the ones to actually read their email. 

the rare times i’ve bothered to engage with antis, i always ask what they’ve done about books like game of thrones, which are published and advertised for the masses, unlike fic, which will never be on the nyt’s bestsellers list. none of them have ever answered, which leads me to believe they haven’t started any petitions about the content of the books in their local libraries. that’s very telling to me about their true motives and goals.

when i started this post, i told myself i was just going to quickly point out how harmful the banning of queer content is and how that’s where this was headed. instead i wrote a novel because this shit matters and has consequences in the real world in a very different way than antis think. 

“You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.” -ray bradbury, fahrenheit 451

***2022 correction: it has been pointed out in several reblogs that the characters in annie on my mind do indeed have sex. i think due to the hullabaloo around the vile content in the book, i was expecting something a little more… you know, vile. explicit. something exciting enough to get so many adults foaming at the mouth. it seems my memory of it not meeting that expectation has erased whatever sexual content is in the book all together. my deepest apologies and thanks to everyone who called that out.

[every-dayiwakeup]

Thinking about how it takes more time and energy to leave a hateful comment on someone's post than to just... simply scroll. It's not that hard. If you didn't like the post, it's not for you.

Why stick around? You're telling me you have nothing better to do than to harass people just because they support a ship you don't? And if you hate a character, why are you tagging them? You tag a character or ship just to trash them. Let it rest. You are not ending ab*se or anything by attacking harringrove shippers.

Especially Steddie shippers. I love Eddie, and Steddie is a cute ship, but why are y'all tagging Billy, or harringrove? He (and harringrove) have nothing to do with Steddie. At this point, you want to start a fight.

Telling people to k!ll themselves because they support a character or a ship doesn't make you a good person. In fact it's cowardly, especially knowing y'all would never actually have the balls to say this shit in real life.

It is 2022. Why are we policing fans of "controversial" characters? Unless the character is based off of a horrible person, and it's a true story, then take off the chronically online badge and abandon the soap box.

*I'm referring to the ships that are not p*do and inc*st btw*

[every-dayiwakeup]

@local-redhead-bookworm

[every-dayiwakeup]

all these byler billy antis crawling out their hole in the ground are about to make me anti byler lmao. it's the way mike was canonically racist towards lucas but they come at us for being racist for liking billy who's implied

It's pathetic. Completely unprovoked.

That being said... their stupidity is not only blood-boiling- it gives me a good cackle lmao

It's like they're coming out- not as gay, but as dumbasses.

For real though, I'm becoming anti byler by the second. The ship itself is cute but the fans... it's always the fucking fans 🙄