#reparative reading

[pixie-stick-it-to-the-man]

Refusing to watch the world burn by engaging in reparative reading, as it turns out, can make things feel a little better.

[umabreakdown]

[thatfantasylovingdork]

The Danger — and Necessity — of Paranoid Reading

What is paranoid reading, and why does Twitter seem to gravitate towards it? Here are the dangers and uses of this kind of criticism.

This is a really interesting article that reminds me a lot of the cancel culture and purity culture I see sometimes online.

[suzannemerence]

How Twitter Can Ruin a Life by Emily St. James

[salamanderinspace]

Reparative Reading and Social Media

[sparkyyoungupstart]

Former Glee fans should be the best at reparative readings because whenever we watch or discuss that show we'll be like "this is bad, this is bad, this is really bad, but something about this show enraptured me I'm my youth and DAMMIT it's in here somewhere!"

[13lizardsinatrenchcoat]

"The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations...The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. This is not new. Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom...

like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”

Isabell Fall, author of Helicopter Story, from the article How Twitter Can Ruin a life by Emily St. James

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

It is genuinely so important to willingly engage with problematic media on occasion, because if you just decide to say "well this is Bad so I'm not going to touch it" all the time, you run the risk of forgetting what the harmful tropes and stereotypes actually look like, especially those that don't directly affect you, which puts you at HIGHER risk of just accepting it when you see an example that isn't as egregious as the version of it in your head that you've taught yourself to avoid at all costs, or possibly worse, pushes you to defend the unfortunate implications when they appear in a piece of media you like, because you fear that if that problematic element is REALLY there, you can't like that story anymore without being A Bad Person.

You see the latter in online fandom all the time, and not just with actually debatable cases; you'll see people respond to "X media has Y bad themes, here's the history" with "NUH-UH IT'S TOTALLY DIFFERENT BECAUSE FUCK YOU I'M NOT A BAD PERSON" instead of "I know, and I don't like that about it; I'm just here for Z and W" (or, you know, just letting it go without getting defensive, because you really shouldn't need to justify yourself to a stranger and pointing out a problematic element in your favorite thing isn't a personal attack, or at least it SHOULDN'T be) no matter how clear it is that the person pointing out the unfortunate aspects is absolutely correct.

For that reason, it's important to occasionally take the time to willfully look at a story with problematic elements, acknowledge them for what they are, and then proceed to ask yourself, why do people like this anyway? What made people overlook this? The answer is pretty much never going to be "oh because they're ALL dyed-in-the-wool bigots who openly hate [insert minority group here] and think you should too." Sometimes it's because a lot of well-meaning people never had a template to realize the problem; sometimes it's that this aspect is just an "OOF" moment in an otherwise good work; sometimes the genre is so glutted with this trope that if you enjoy anything in it at all you've just had to learn to go "😬 damn I hope they didn't mean anything by that" for a moment and move on - sometimes in the case of older works, the work even predates the stereotype that made you go "dude what the fuck" and only became so glaring later!

Doing this with classics, especially those that have already fallen into the public domain, is an especially great way to approach this exercise, because it allows you to completely disregard the author's intention from your selection and stop worrying as much about whether the problematic elements were Just The Standard Trope, an unfortunate coincidence, or actual blatant hatred, because you're not going to accidentally fund direct harm against you or others by buying or promoting it.

Problematic tropes aren't a mind control beam. Practicing recognizing them for what they are, and for how and why people overlook them, is the closest to immunity to propaganda you can get.