Pay No Attention to the Voice Behind The Veil

This is an "angry about fandom" sideblog. I'm not hiding my identity to start drama, I'm just firewalling my notifications so they're not in my main feed.

[zeetannas]

to be honest i think there’s a large number of people who conflate the very real and widespread phenomenon that women tend to be written off as just mothers or love interests in order to diminish their importance in a given story with the fact that a huge reason they’re sent to narrative purgatory in this way is BECAUSE the labels of “mother” and “girlfriend/wife” are systematically devalued and seen as inherently inferior because they’re terms that have been associated with ownership and/or control over women. like the amount of people who’ve told me that a certain female character is uninteresting or badly written because she happened to have a kid or be a man’s girlfriend or sister just to find out she was actually fleshed out very well and carried significant narrative importance frustrates me soo bad. there’s a huge problem with how those roles (specifically “wife” and “mother”) are systematically devalued and yet also perpetuated as the only viable options for women to achieve their societal roles in the patriarchy but acknowledging the devaluation of those labels to begin with is an important discussion in itself.

[preheville]

sorry i'm still angry about this but if your excuse for not caring about female characters is because you're not sexually attracted to them you are exactly 0 degrees of rhetorical separation from a redditor whining about how his favourite video game is now "too woke" because the women don't show enough skin

[furryprovocateur]

[thedreamthieves]

i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it like…impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.

[vigilskept]

really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up

[entryn17]

was gonna make a post scratching my head over how come the state of discussion surrounding marginalized identity and accountability on here has become so goddamn infuriating to sift through but genuinely i think it's cause white marginalized people on this site sincerely believe their oppression on different axes innoculates them against participating in any form of bigotry especially racism. it literally all boils down to that

[entryn17]

it makes me drag my hands down my face seeing the same one situation occur again and again where a white person on this site will say some extremely tone-deaf and racist shit and then god forbid an aggressive, i mean scary, i mean killjoy, i mean passionate person of color brings it up and it all becomes about how the white person is neurodivergent or transgender or gay or disabled or was vagued on twitter or was a gifted kid or is trying to heal their inner child or they're playing toys or something

[cabinetduo]

so many popular examples of fandom racism are barely actual fandom brand racism bcs white ppl (and honestly too many non black ppl) need outright in your face blatant stuff as proof to shocked and appalled by. most of it is the classic "I'm not touching you style" that's easier to gaslight around which is what a majority of racism is, gaslighting. slave fics a tortureporn of characters of color are awful but that's like individual weirdos who it's easy to mark off as obviously racist. The attention and outrage surrounding these little incidents allows everyone to feel better because of how exaggerated and one off they are, bad eggs in a good batch etc.

Real fandom racism is watching the darkest characters get boxed into the specific outsider pov trope over and over despite them being a core member of the cast. it's watching everyone have in depth headcanons for every character but them, denying them the complexity their counterparts get. It's them getting written out of their own plots, receiving little to no audience sympathy when they ARE complex, and, most importantly, watching them get cast in the same exact role when shipping comes in

but all this isn't loud, it's quiet and unnoticeable unless you've had to watch it play out with every favorite character you've had ever since you were ten and started engaging with fandom. it's repetitive, uncreative, infuriating and worst of all NOBODY WILL LISTEN WHEN YOU POINT IT OUT because you're just imagining it and they're not touching you. I've been making my own content and I've seen how people will go out of their way NOT to engage or engage specifically only to discredit a character of color.

it's not a one off thing or even a small pattern, it is what fandom culture is BUILT on, picking the palest skinniest most pathetic looking man in the cast, projecting onto him and ignoring literally everyone and everything else whether that be fanon over plot or the interesting female or darker skinned characters and masking racism behind fanon tropes

[magnetictapedatastorage]

“power corrupts” does NOT mean “oppression purifies”

[monstrouscrew]

this fandom has a tendency to repeatedly post about the same things (fanons, questions, canon details). we are highly likely to contribute to these ripples in the void. anyways!

Carl. and why there are very few users who ship Grace with him, romantically or not, a possible reason.

a disclaimer: we aren't POC by US standards at least, we live in another big rotten empire and we don't think that any sort of murder is the best conflict solution.

tl;dr: Carl is an interesting side character, but we cannot sympathise with him.

Carl is presented to us in that typical "men in black" look. However, to us, he looks friendlier and less likely to shoot you in the back, because afawk Black Americans are more likely to be shot dead or attacked for any so called suspicious behaviour than white people are, so Carl is supposedly aware how does it feel someone who can shoot or arrest you following you.

Still, he works for the government. And he's probably something like FSS agents here. So it makes everything he does looking fake: smiling to Grace, playing with him while shopping for construction materials, talking to him. Do not trust a damn Chekist! Of course, Grace is probably unaware of why these sorts of people aren't friends, he's more likely to be okay with cops and military stuff around (he's white, he's safe), and he's unbearably naive when it's about social interactions and relationships.

In the end, we get what we can't avoid: a man from the government checking on Grace who's thrown on the ground. To us, he won't help Grace because he never intended to be his real friend. He was simply watching over Grace. And this, by the way, makes movie!Stratt terrifying as well as book!Stratt is. She can act like real dictators giving orders to arrest, imprison and murder their opponents, the difference is that she does it for literally all mankind and is willing to step down when her job is done. Carl? Carl was just doing his job. Nothing really shippable. And, if Carl was played by a white actor, the truth would be less shocking. Because a white man watching someone being executed (Grace was meant to die aboard in the end of the mission, remember?) is nothing new. They do it all the time.

[theobule-caul]

This is what fandom racism looks like. Saying that Carl is "unsympathetic" while ascribing the worst possible motives to him (a Chekist?? fucking really??).

We don't know Carl's motives or inner philosophy. We don't know if he's a government agent or private (civilian) security hired by Eva. We don't know WHY he works the job he does. His line about "we're the government... all of them" does not make Grace a military/government officer, and assuming it DOES make Carl one is a double standard! And even if he DID work for the US government, drawing direct parallels between him and a group that directly participates/ed in wide-scale oppression is, uh, a HELL of a stretch (and I say that as someone disgusted by US imperialism and other bullshit).

Assuming the worst of Black characters (while projecting an over-simplisric idea of racial politics in the US as justification!) with little to no textual evidence and using those assumptions to dismiss those characters from consideration (for shipping purposes or just for sympathetic headcanoning) is TEXTBOOK fandom racism.

And while Eva's actions are also... conflicting for the reader/viewer, people seem to be able to ship her and Grace just fine! In fact, fandom usually has NO issue shipping outright enemies (which Carl and Grace are not!) or heroes with villains (which Carl is not!) who've committed far worse sins/crimes in other media, so EVEN IF Carl were a worse character, that's not a real justification for why people don't ship him.

Firmly stating that Carl's actions make him "unshippable" and that "we cannot sympathize with him" is a personal opinion (based on racist assumptions) that is being stated as an objective fact. There are PLENTY of us who consider Carl an interesting, engaging character, even one that diverges from the standard "Man in Black" stereotype through hints of playfulness and levity. You don't speak for us. Your opinion is not objectively true.

This is, quite frankly, bad analysis.

[toasthaste]

there is only one white boy in the movie project hail mary. 90 seconds into trawling the tag on here i learn that the fandom's solution to the terrible problem of not having two white boys to ship together is to ship him with the markiplier character from the iron lung movie. markiplier. they're shipping him with markiplier. with markiplier. markiplier. markiplier. they're shipping him with markiplier.

[toasthaste]

I need to be clear. this isn't one or two posts that I'm cherry picking. I did my due diligence. I checked. it is a very visible significant portion of the project hail mary tag. I have seen substantially more of it in the tag than I have seen Anything in there depicting either of the other human characters (white woman, black man) in project hail mary, in any capacity. im going to do a harm to someone.

[toasthaste]

it is upwards of 50% of the tag I think. I am thinking about the many justifications so often made for why fandom tends to focus so hard on characters of a certain demographic at the expense of characters from any other demographic. I am thinking about that very much. and I am biting.

[ot3]

like i need to be clear that i wouldn't give a shit if anyone was posting good omens fandom stuff if the guy was, like, dead, this isn't 2014 "irredeemable media" style gripe about a work having become spiritually tainted by the actions of its creator. the is an instance where someone's platform and reputation are the thing they have used to create victims and isolate themselves from consequences. and who, while his legal battle with his victims is still currently ongoing, stands to benefit materially from anything that continues to grant his work cultural relevance.

and i think if you genuinely care about victims you have an obligation to, at the very least, consider whether or not the way you post about good omens is contributing to the idea that gaiman's work is good or valuable enough to excuse or overlook what he has done to people and could still pretty easily do again. there are an infinite number of things you could be blorboposting about right now instead.

[ot3]

accidentally tabbed into the explore page and the first thing trending on tumblr is good omens... kind of blows my mind how a man being a violent rapist who pretty explicitly used the social capital he gained by being a famous author to abuse women is not enough to turn you off of doing Fandom Stuff with their work. but fictional men being more real to the average tumblr user than real women is not surprising so I guess I don't have any right to act scandalized. it's just depressing man

[ot3]

like there's a conversation to be had for sure about what the appropriate ways are to engage with the work of a still-living creative who has been proven to use the goodwill their fame has bought them to get away with abusing people. because I don't think asking for gaiman or anyone else's entire body of work to be completely removed from any kind of public discussion is reasonable or practical. but I don't know man I am just personally of the belief that Fandomposting identically to the type of fandomposting you were doing before these facts came to light is really not it no matter how much you might talk about hating him in between those fandomposts.

[ot3]

you are too old to be misunderstanding what "death of the author" means this badly. it's not very complicated at all. it refers to the audiences interpretation of a text superseding authorial intent, and has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you excuse platforming someone who uses that platform to commit abuse. and to defend the "meaning and joy" people get out of publicly celebrating and legitimizing the work of a man who is currently still alive and whose numerous victims are still in a protracted legal battle to receive some semblance of justice for the hideous abuse they were subjected to is vile.

every time the general public is given the chance to stand by abuse victims they prioritize their own personal comfort and desire for entertainment, and there's nothing I can do to stop that but what I can do is tell them all they should be ashamed of themselves. because they should be and I have no qualms saying it no matter how "meaningful" gaimans work has been to them

[depsidase]

[mortalityplays]

on a very very very basic level how do you not think the statement "straight women just naturally aren't interested in the emotional lives of female characters" is stupid as fuck and approximately as misogynistic as the worldview of the hypothetical straight woman who doesn't care about the emotional lives of other women

[sun-moon-talia]

in 2014 you could come on here and say “misogyny is bad and more ppl should consume media that includes women” and everyone would agree with you. nowadays you post something like “if you don’t care about women you might be a misogynist” and the reblogs are ppl saying “ummmmmm this take is actually problematic bc the only way i can escape misogyny is by pretending women don’t exist :/” we’re so cooked.

[the-quasar-hero]

>Predominately Black led piece of media becomes popular.

>Among the characters there are one or two White characters with minor and/or distinctly antagonistic roles.

>White tumblr users focus entirely on said White characters.

>Tag of Black led piece of media is filled with posts about White character(s)

>Rinse. Repeat.

[the-stormwagon]

I think the most charitable interpretation of this is that people connect to characters that are like them, and that the experiences of Blackness is so alien to them that the White characters are the only ones that White people connect with. Combine that with the fact that Tumblr is so White as a platform, and you get this issue.

It’s still bad and racist, but it is understandable. People should still do better though. (I’m not trying to justify, I’m trying to come up with an explanation)

[the-quasar-hero]

Please don’t make me say it.

[tartrazeen]

We don't need you coming up with an charitable interpretation.

[buckys-robot-arm]

Prev tags too good to leave in the tags

[halque]

btw the "women aren't written in a compelling way" argument quickly falls flat when the people who say these things also happen to be fans of MEN who aren't written well. you can argue that its the system which is misogynistic all you want, but drooling over a gimmick-y trope-y male character a second after tells me all i need to know