crossposts from tumblr

it’s literally impossible to have a sustained, intelligent dialogue about the ways in which minor’s sexuality is demonized without some brain trust going ‘yes but what about the adults, and the laws—’ we’re not talking about adults and we’re trying to change the law. please try to keep up.

very emo love/hate letters to fandom

fandom is not an activism space. it is a space which is occupied by activists, but it is not ground for activism. fandom, arguably, is the opposite of activism space; a space which is continually referential to the media and cultural context around it. fandom is the house of mirrors that takes what we see and twists it around into something familiar and unrecognizable, and it cannot do this without something to refer to - this is all a very longwinded way of saying that fandom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. fandom is referential and reflective and recreative.

there is no activism in a mirror world. activisting in a mirror world is entirely useless and hopeless. it leads to misery, because no matter how much you endeavour to change the reflection you see, you can only briefly distort it before it goes back to doing what it was doing before; reflecting the broader context it is in front of.

fandom activism is doomed from the start. we make it worse, though, by trying to point at individuals who are supposedly embodying the kinds of things we’re trying to fight against: racism, sexism, transphobia. but individuals are not the problem. individuals are not to blame for the systemic trends coalescing around us. nor are they the ones to be held responsible. doing so is counterproductive: the nature of online discourse is to erase relevant nuance. the nature of fandom activists is to erase it further.

this is because the people who choose fandom as activism ground are by and large bad faith actors. good activists know that activisting in fandom is tiresome and thankless and useless. bad faith actors know that this is where they can get people. this is where they can exploit reflective pain and hurt communities and shatter lives. and so that’s what they do. fandom activists point at individuals instead of pointing at trends. they encourage misinformation, dogpiling, and harassment. they rarely apologise, even more rarely back down, and never change their behavior. they are abusers.

the problem is that it’s hard to name and call out these abusive trends. bad faith actors and fandom activists hide behind their own progressive rhetoric to interpret criticisms of them as -isms and -phobias. and they’re right just enough that real criticism flies under the radar.

all of which is not to say that fandom cannot be better, or that there is no hope for us. just because you cannot activist in fandom does not mean fandom could not be more diverse. fandom does have a racism problem. fandom does have a sexism problem. but these problems are rooted not in the people fandom is comprised of, but in the culture we exist in. you can do things to make your individual corners of fandom better: you can boost the artwork of creators of color, queer and trans creators, you can make art and fic and edits featuring characters of color, and queer and trans and mentally ill characters. just because you cannot activist in fandom does not mean you cannot be better as an individual. it’s not enough to change the world but it’s worth something and it’s enough.

fandom is a place for us to rest. it’s a place for us to let ourselves be affected by all the forces that make up our lives. here is where we put in passion and love so that we have the mental energy to survive an increasingly brutal world. here is where we look out for each other. fandom isn’t where we beat each other up - it’s the place where we take all our hurt and trauma and aching and make something out of it to help ourselves and others.