went to the ao3 subreddit because I kinda wanted to start a discussion but then I checked the rules for good measure and
glad I missed it but also like. y'all fandom spaces really are that bad
Yes. Yes they are.
So I saw this last night right as I was going to sleep, but I want to expand on this.
Yes, fandom spaces are actively hostile to Jews; the Hamasnik fandom (because that's what they are) have spent the last two and a half years engaging in ship-war behavior towards any and all Jews they can find in fandom spaces. There have been lists made of Jewish fandom authors. There have been harassment campaigns. There has been--to show how fandom-brained these people are--active disregard for the "canon" (i.e. recorded history) in favor of their "fanon" (i.e. wish fulfillment fantasies) that goes so far beyond the Islamist propaganda that it oftentimes crosses over into the patently absurd. There has been such an incredible amount of active hostility towards (((Zionists))) in fandom spaces that it almost boggles the mind. And it is so tied into toxic fandom behaviors that it is effectively inseparable.
I can give a concrete, if minor example from my own case. A few years back, I had a pair of stalkers who were upset about how I treated their blorbos in my historical fic and not having gold-star lesbians. Their "friend" (I'm still skeptical that it was a third person, given the consistent use of burner accounts to communicate) proceeded to create a hate blog targeting me personally, and when that didn't get the response they wanted, then created an AO3 account to gift me 33,000 words of hate-fic, and when that didn't work, they tried to make a call-out blog accusing me of homophobia and misogyny. It blew up in their faces when I posted my "in case of further harassment, hit post" explanation, and they took the hate blog, hate-fic, and callout blog down as a result.
Three months later was the 7/10 massacre. I got these lovely "Anon" (because if these aren't from my stalkers, I'll eat my yarmulke) Asks on Oct 8th and 9th:
This is just a sampling of what I received, btw; note that their response to a massacre of Jews was to engage in and mix with fandom hate.
And this example doesn't even ding the meter compared with what some other Jews in fandom spaces endured.
Another example, which was actually part of what tipped me over from "that's horrible and I feel bad for everyone involved, but there's nothing I can do" to "...you know, if this is the treatment Jews and Israeli get these days, maybe what little I CAN do actually matters".
There was a hugely popular fanart of one of my favorite characters that circulated for a long while, gained huge amounts of notes, everyone except me seemed to love it. And then in January '24 someone of Self-Importance in the fandom reposted it and said we should repudiate it.
Because they'd looked through the artist's archive and seen she'd drawn [character] from [sports anime] in Israeli team uniform. And -gasp!- hadn't taken the drawing down even after the "genocide" began!
Which clearly showed she believes Israel has a right to exist as a nation! And do we really want to platform someone like that in our fandom?
And I'm sitting there like... you're making a FANDOM thing out of this. There was a massacre, now there is a war, real people are suffering and you're taking the chance to attack other people over fucking FANART. You're pretending that reblogging a drawing is "platforming" someone politically. And what the fuck do you mean about thinking Israel has a right to exist? Isn't it just Islamist terrorists who think it shouldn't?!
(Yeah. I was that ignorant. But, well, I've learned better since, even if much of what I've learned is fucking depressing.)
Reminds me of Hatsune Miku.
In August 2024, somebody posted an image of a stereotypically Brazilian looking Hatsune Miku (KYM ref, pic).
Within days, everybody else was posting artwork of Hatsune Miku as their own local culture/ethnicity. You had Argentinian Miku, Mexican Miku, old world Mikus like Vietnamese Miku, and of course Mikus of various US regions, cities and states - Michigan Miku, Pacific Northwest Miku, Texan Miku, Orlando Miku, and I can't find the link anymore but I swear I saw a Philadelphia Miku at one point.
And while most of those links are to Know Your Meme, that's mostly because it was easiest to refer back to now years later - at the time, most of these were on Tumblr (and probably still are, though with Tumblr's search feature good luck finding them).
All of them drawn to reflect what the artist thougt of as their culture, and maybe half at best were in 'traditional'/'indiginous' dress with the rest wearing modern streetwear- the OG, after all, is both Brazilian and wearing jorts; see also this Korean Miku cramming for exams for another random example. And all of them got positive comments from English-language tumblr. Nobody talked about politics, only how fun it was to learn about cultures.
But the Hatsune Mikus drawn to be Israeli? Three kinds of responses. American Jews, Israelis, and everybody else complaining that they 'looked American' (no more than anybody else's modern-dress Mikus) and were 'glorifying settler Colonialism' and were 'offensive to Palestinians'.
Everybody in the world, no matter how corrupt their government or how dark their nation's past or present, was invited to play Local Culture dress-up with Hatsune Miku - except Israelis, who were told they were explicitly shut out of the party and that wearing their local culture would be Offensively Out Of Character for the AI that literally has no lore and has already been depicted as a dozen other legacies of war crimes that week alone.
Like, Brazilian Miku didn't exactly look Guarani, y'know? Change the team on her shirt and the brand of soda she's drinking (Israeli organizations and brands both having been featured in the cast-out Israeli Mikus!) and she'd fit in just as well in Miami. It was so obviously a case of popularity, i.e., fandom, rather than even an attempt at consistent principle. More consistent with the response of Star Wars fans to a Reylo fic than anything else.
Making it a Fandom is the Point Fandom functions as a Faith-replacement for bullies and lonely/vulnerable people. (Long post and sources incoming) The objectives of these spaces are not to save Palestinians or anything like that. They are to perpetuate, radicalize vulnerable members, and marginalize and kill Jews as an outlet. That's what they do, that's all they do, and the consumerist fandom model works to help capture people into the Ziggurat of Zealotry. (From 2006, before NYT really shat the bed, and relevant from a recruitment and leveraging perspective via fandom and pop culture spaces:
A team of C.I.A. analysts, however, has devised a new, and possibly potent, way of looking at the problem. The agency's "Ziggurat of Zealotry" arrays Islamists into a pyramid in the Mesopotamian style, with each ascending level representing a leap in radicalization. At the bottom of the ziggurat are peaceful individuals who concern themselves with what some call the greater jihad, the personal struggle to be a dutiful and pious Muslim. Some of those individuals step up to join groups like Tablighi Jamaat -- a missionary organization founded in India -- that organize devout Muslims to effect change in their societies. Above that, you find groups with more radical political agendas, typically the overthrow or replacement of governments they regard as repressive and hostile to Islam as they believe it should be practiced. The next step abandons politics for violence exclusively. The top level covers only those who extend this mandate for violence globally and seek to destroy the Western nation-state system. The ziggurat is said to be the brainchild of Cindy Storer, an analyst at the C.I.A.'s counterterror center, who presented it publicly at the University of Pennsylvania in March. The model usefully implies that recruiters from one level draw almost exclusively from the level directly beneath them. It also implies that radicalization is neither fluid nor inevitable; radical Muslims are not destined to become violent. The task for counterterrorism, then, is to disrupt the "elevators" that pull individuals and resources up the ziggurat without taking steps to incur the ire of lower levels and nudge them upward.
It's funny because of how many of them ID as secular socialists but the fandom framing of it all is incredibly consumerist and manifesting as a gamified Cult-Faith. You do the cosplay, you buy the merch, you add the omnicause, and the more you participate from safety, the more you level up.
Also, hamas/IRI/Qatar funded networks are heavily embedded into global pop culture and viral video spaces like "Publicfreakout" which keep surfacing (Not to mention the other "Pop Base" style twitter/social media accounts which seesaw between "WHIMSICAL CELEB/Blood libel Omnicause" shit.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline
To quote myself:
But it bears repeating that it turns out if you displace all the evils of the world onto one group of people you've just created a belief system and cult wherein the only way to positively affect change in the world is to target, marginalize and eliminate that same group of people and not actually work towards the causes your organization ostensibly stands for. When doing that doesn't manifest Sparklemotion and a Clean Star Trek Federation Future, clearly it's because you missed a couple of the Evil Group of People.
“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
I wonder how many people drop this Pratchett quote and then scream about perfidious Jews 'zionists' It's probably a lot. And there's a reason I keep calling it a fandom-cult. Because it fucking is.
Gough says she doesn’t understand the analogy—she heard it from a friend with a stronger grasp of intergalactic space fables—but she gets the crux of it, which involves shooting Israel: “Apparently the Death Star has a place in it that if you shoot through that specific place in the Death Star, you explode the entire Death Star, okay? And so somebody said Palestine is that place. And the construction of the Death Star is like all of it—Sudan, Congo, all of it everywhere, Nigeria now, everywhere. If we can free Palestine, it explodes everything.” One can only imagine Gough trying to describe the concept of an Achilles’ heel. I should note that for this conversation Gough is in costume—not a Star Wars costume but a Palestinian costume, a designer keffiyeh from an Instagram influencer. Gough is promoting the idea that the Jews are responsible for all the remaining injustice in the world. Destroying the Death Star of David would liberate Congo, in her portrayal. Gough’s understanding of geopolitics is what things would look like if Carmen Sandiego worked for the NKVD. Why is this interesting? Because Gough is describing the progressive obsession with Israel as a form of primitive religious fanaticism. And it is accurate.
Actors’ opinions on the Middle East are rarely interesting, but there are occasional exceptions. Denise Gough, a fairly generic actress from
When you read testimonies of people who left the movement, their stories are identical to people who escape cults. Any dissent is immediately shut down. If you question the movement you are ostracised and lose your entire social circle.
