given Recent Fandom Events and the fact that I fuckin’ love to complain about fandom stuff that I hate, I just wanted to make a quick post on the matter of making lists of Bad People and Good People and how unutterably stupid that is.
I don’t have a problem being upfront about stuff that I dislike, stuff that I think is bad or stupid, or stuff that I think is frankly extremely fucked-up. I’m picky and petty and the more fic I write for a fandom the more refined and specific my tastes tend to get. but that’s on me. it’s on me to read tags, to take note of warnings, to employ tools like AO3 Saviour, and when I encounter something I dislike to backbutton, gripe about it vaguely, and move the fuck on with my life.
I have a serious anxiety disorder that the NHS refuses to send me to see an actual psychiatrist to get properly categorised, but which I’ve been told has ‘elements of trauma-related stress’. I also have a history of self-destructive and semi-addictive behaviour. I have actual legitimate psychological triggers, by which I don’t mean ‘things that it upsets me to see’ but ‘things that will cause multi-day panic attacks and/or flashbacks and/or bouts of damaging behaviour’. and I am a fucking adult and it is my business to manage these very serious and potentially damaging things for myself. it is part of recovery and being able to function in society. am I always very good at it? fuck no. but it’s my fucking job, nobody else’s.
I remember when the first conversations about establishing the AO3 happened on LJ. it was in the wake of a lot of upsets about censorship and control of fan-created content, and one of the most basic principles of the Archive was always going to be that it would accept basically everything. fandom is a space where you gotta do you. did you know there was a lot of wank back in ~08/09 about using warnings on fic, because some people considered any kind of warning a spoiler? that’s why ‘choose not to warn’ is an option on AO3. the idea that fandom has to be this neatly crimped and controlled space where everyone toes a particular political line, so it fits some person or other’s concept of ‘safeness’, is incredibly new. transformative fandom- that is to say, fic-writing and fanart-creating fandom- is a place to explore ideas and desires, and given that it has always been female-dominated it has been treated as suspect and freakish and dangerous from the very beginning. but I don’t think we’ve ever engaged so much in doing that to ourselves as is apparently now par for the course on tumblr.
I was not, thank god, on either the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ lists on That Blog, although given that I wrote a 100k fic in which both main characters kill someone on screen, one of them pretends to be a Nazi and the other pretends to be loyal to Imperial Japan, and plot elements include discovering the true extent of the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Soviet war crimes, I’m sure I’m on someone’s shitlist for Daring To Write About Such Things. maybe just to round off my problematicness I should add that I think Yuri/Otabek is adorable, that I think both Victor and Yuuri live with mental illness and it’s the subject of my current WIP, and that the only reason I’m not all up on genderswapped femslash is that nobody ever seems to write any characters as butches. am I bad and wrong enough yet? am I going to be stoned anon-harassed to death with all the other naughty women thinking about sex on the internet? because let’s be real here, the only reason anyone makes these unfounded lists of Bad Tumblr Users is for harassment, however much they deny it.
actual safe spaces are by necessity small, closed, and tightly moderated. I’ve participated in some and they are immensely valuable. but you cannot possibly take the principles of a dedicated, purposeful space and try to impose them on a huge, sprawling social morass like fandom. society doesn’t work that way. humans don’t work that way. and it would be bad if they did. it is part and parcel of growing the fuck up and learning to live in society that you have to deal with people who have opinions you find weird, stupid, or deeply objectionable.
I think it’s a reasonable expectation that content creators like fic writers and fanartists tag/label their content appropriately, which includes stating a choice not to warn. and it’s reasonable as a content consumer to say ‘I hate x’ or ‘y is legitimately upsetting to me’ and to avoid content that involves x and/or y. but setting yourself up as the fandom morality police and calling people ‘shit’ for creating and enjoying stuff you don’t want to create or enjoy is fucked-up and idiotic.
hmm that wasn’t such a quick post. oh well.