#stitchmediamix

[furiousfinnstan]

Twilight’s Jasper Cullen Is Part of Confederate Vampire History

If a vampire is a white supremacist in the 1800s, how are fans actually supposed to know that the character isn’t one now?

[nerdsagainstfandomracism]

What’s Happening With “Rings of Power” Isn’t New. It Also Isn’t Normal.

“As a human it’s not okay to be reading the N-word in so many languages for about two years by this point,” says Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays an elf in the new LOTR series.

When marginalized people talk about how much representation matters, we're often met with people laughing at us and saying, “It's not that deep, it's just fiction.” But if it's just fiction, why do fans of popular nerd properties feel as though they are entitled to harass people over diversity in these series? We're told that none of this is deep and that none of it matters and yet the aggressive harassment, open racism and misogyny, and review bombing continue across years whenever a popular nerd franchise casts a person of color in a major role or changes a character to be queer. Even in situations where it's an entirely original property or the characters were already queer or not white in the source media, these fans that claim they only care about accuracy still turn around and accuse creators of “woke pandering.” They still accuse the creators of “going woke” even when all we're doing is talking about, enjoying, and creating characters that represent the viewers of these shows today.

[ryuutchi]

Teen Vogue posted the dumbest fucking article about how harmful is is to woobify villains, and then cited Treize "nobly and poorly trying to find a way out of the cycle of war" Khushrenada as proof the author understands a villain shouldn't be woobified.

Look at this man! He is a goddamn Disney Princess! People have been woofibying him since the mid-90s! You missed the entire point of GW that almost nobody is actually a Bad Person (tm) and people are complex even if they're doing awful things, and they all can be lovable characters who thought they were doing they right thing.

[wolfstar-in-color]

Resources Wednesday

Today in our resources Wednesday we want to invite you to check the columns from Stitch, in stitchmediamix. Stitch has been talking about racism and misogynoir for a long time in fandom spaces, using a nuanced yet positioned perspective and critical social analysis about the struggles of POC fans and creators (and particularly black fans and creators), representation in media, shipping dynamics, amongst others. A voice that we need to uplift and learn from, without a doubt!

We particularly recommend you to check the following columns:

What fandom racism looks like: white silence/violence

What fandom racism looks like: misogynoir - Introduction

Applied to Fandom: the Death of the Author

There are tons of other resources, some of which might mobilize you to question yourself and your role in fandom. We invite you to live the discomfort that this content might bring you! You can check the page in depth - if there’s any column you want to chat about, your Mods of Wolfstar in Color are always down for a healthy exchange! And don’t forget to like and/or comment on Stitch’s page!

[godihatethisfreakingcat]

All right, so leaving aside whatever people may think of me, let me clear something up, as I’m sure some people have likely stopped by here to take a look or a stalk:

https://twitter.com/stitchmediamix/status/1504544332971446276

I am not the person who DM’d Stitch. I don’t even have Twitter, and I don’t and never will send hate in DMs. The person who sent the DM informed me after the fact that she had done it (something I did NOT ask her to do), and her Tumblr, where she has posted extensively about the issue, is linked in her Twitter header, something that Stitch will see if she looks. She thought that Stitch was vaguing about her because she was the one who originally broached the concept.

She’s also been exceptionally open about the, if not racism, at the very least constant othering she experiences from ignorant white Americans - not in 1890 or 1920, but now. In 2022.

As for Luca Marinelli, specifically: no, he’s not going to get shot by the police or searched at the airport (something that I have, incidentally, experienced on a number of occasions). He gets afforded the privileges of whiteness whenever someone looks at him. He’s also subjected to xenophobia in this fandom that the Northern European actors simply aren’t. It’s him that the “no thoughts, head empty” memes were flying around about, and it’s him that people wrote ignorant Mafia headcanons for when those monsters are the biggest danger in Italy, and it’s him that people point to and say “dirty trash man” even though Matthias Schoenaerts is a literal cokehead (and was the first person to mock Luca’s accent in interviews in a way that clearly humiliated him).

When I say that someone is neither white nor POC, it doesn’t mean they’re treated as badly as someone who is Black, Asian, Native, or Latino. It means that they’re subjected to some low-level sketchy treatment that someone who’s seen as a “real” white person 100% of the time doesn’t have to deal with. I was angry in that post and my comments about racism in America vs. Europe were off the mark, and I’m sorry. I still think there’s room for nuance.

And for the gazillionth time, I will neither defend nor read racist fic or stereotypes, and I think the whole mess is utterly disgusting. I’m seashadows on AO3 and that’s all the fic I’ve written for TOG; I have nothing to hide. In terms of what I wrote in December, all I wanted to do was tell the truth.

By the way? The actual North Africans (you know, the people of the same or similar ethnicities as Joe) in the fandom said much the same thing.

[brydeswhale]

So this person actually blocked me or something before I could respond to their earlier messages, hence the call out post. Also I don’t really know where they came from because the last time I talked about Roswell NM was, like, last year? I think.

I dropped out of the fandom because I was really tired of how biphobic, classist, and anti-Black* it was. The anti-Indigenous stuff that came out after Blackburn’s little fiasco were the last straw and I really did not want to watch the show after that.

So this person decided to harass me for… having an opinion on Tyler Blackburn’s behaviour, specifically that I didn’t like it, that I don’t believe he didn’t know he was basically stealing a role from an Indigenous actor under false pretences, and that I thought the relationship between his character and Michael(actor name I don’t remember) was toxic as written and their breakup was a good writing decision.

Tyler Blackburn doesn’t know me. My opinion on him has not effected his life in any way, except that I stopped watching the show he was on. It has not affected lovesfern in any way except that they apparently think they have to defend a c/d list actor from me thinking he’s a jerk over something he did.

It can be hard to admit when a fave messes up. Even if it’s not a deal breaker, the nature of a paradoxical relationship is that we feel a knee jerk urge to defend them, even if they really didn’t need our defence and haven’t faced any consequences beyond a few people online calling them a jerk.

Stitch of Teen Vogue and Stitch’s Multi Media Mix covers this feeling in their September 10th Fanservice column.

This particular quote might be of help to @fernloves and their ilk.

I have anon turned off for a reason. Basically, because I’ve been harassed in the past by other cowards who thought it was okay to harangue me for not liking their fave and for speaking out against bigotry in fandom. I don’t care for messages like this. They’re stupid and all they do is piss me off.

So, I’m actually kind of impressed that @fernloves decided to go in openly and send entitled, rude messages to someone who thinks that Tyler Blackburn’s racist, entitled actions were a dealbreaker for them. I mean, most of the time these people do these things anonymously, so, like, good for you, I guess?

But the fact that they have chosen not to have manners has nothing to do with me. While I feel some sympathy for them(I myself was pretty sad when Alec Baldwin’s abusive behaviour came out), I am not obligated to host their content/respond to their harassment in the form of asks, or remain silent while they behave like this. People like this make fandom shitty for everyone.

*it was also specifically misogynoir towards Maria that put me off the fandom itself.

[pearwaldorf]

Clarifications

Thank you to Stitch, unclesteeb, and lunaaltaire for their comments. It was not my intention to imply that black fans don’t have the right to screen for content and/or recommend works that don’t dehumanize or mischaracterize a black character or perpetuate shitty tropes. If that’s how any of it came across, I’m sorry that I was not clearer about that. I’m also going to walk back the “performative moral games” bit. That was unfair and poorly worded.

I suppose there’s no way to say this without sounding like “But why wasn’t I picked?” but here we go. In the solicitation post for this rec list (which I can’t find), all people were asked was that they submit their Sam-centric fics for consideration. Obviously not everything would make the cut, but it was a little surprising to find out that not just the work was being judged, but also the author as a person. I don’t know that I would have put my work into for consideration if I’d known that, and probably other people as well. That is what makes me uncomfortable.

By all means, judge the work and recommend it enthusiastically if it fits your criteria or ignore it if it doesn’t. That’s something that stands on its own. The judgment of somebody’s moral character? That’s more complicated.

[nerdsagainstfandomracism]

12-Year-Old “Percy Jackson” Star Leah Jeffries Deserves Better From Fandom

“We’re always reminded that our presence is seen as an agenda.”

From the moment that Rick Riordan announced that Leah Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri would play Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, respectively, in a new adaptation of the beloved YA novels, fandom reacted poorly. So far, much of the racist anger online has been aimed squarely at Leah Jeffries; people mass reported her TikTok account until it was banned (likely for Leah being under 13, the bottom age on the platform) and made rude comments in the vein of “You are not Annabeth” or “Percy wouldn’t want to be with her now.” All of the insults and harassment, even from people who’ve never even read a Percy Jackson book before, stem from Leah not matching up to the in-book description of main character Annabeth Chase, who’s first described as, “a pretty girl, her blonde hair curled like Cinderella’s.”

The thing is, Alexandra Daddario’s Annabeth also wasn’t a blonde with gray eyes when she played the character in the film series. The aggressive fandom claiming to love novel accuracy so much that they are compelled to harass a child didn’t have that smoke for her back then, when they waved away her visual dissimilarities by insisting she must have been the best actress for the role. People who hate racebending will always find a way to doublethink. For example: Those who criticized live action versions of comic book characters like James Olsen or Starfire (both recently played by Black actors Mehcad Brooks and Anna Diop respectively) said nothing about how the actors who have played Barry Allen so far don’t look at all like the illustrated character.