(((I Will Outlive)))

i used to wonder—why do people feel the need to pit horrific suffering against horrific suffering? and then i realized that deep down, they feel that the issue they have chosen to align with is only worthy of care if it’s objectively the Worst Thing Ever. if it isn’t, then it isn’t worthy of care. so they have to downplay and diminish other examples of suffering, or the whole thing falls apart.

For the record: just because a child is planned, just because a child is fought for, just because a child is wanted does not mean they will never be abused.

Abusive parents can plan to have kids and fight for the right to have children. Mothers can be abusive. Parents of mentally ill kids can be abusive. Adoptive parents, lgbt+ parents, and mentally ill parents can be abusive. 

This doesn’t negate the struggles of adoptive, lgbt+, or mentally ill parents who have to fight for their children. It doesn’t mean that most lgbt+ or mentally parents are abusive. 

But pretending like there’s some trait that automatically makes you a good parent shelters abusers. If it’s unthinkable that so-and-so would hurt their kids because they’re “a good Christian” or because “they adopted six children” or “they’re lgbt+, they had to fight for their kids!”, you can wind up with dead children on your hands. 

I don’t understand why people who cannot accept any moral grayness or complexity decide to join fandoms for the most emotionally complex stories and then try to shame everyone there who actually is able to understand the material.

There seems to be a tendency in fandom to assume the worst of creators’ intentions. Very often the discourse that arises claiming that a piece of media is problematic comes from parts of the fandom interpreting the media in the most uncharitable way possible even though there are far more benign interpretations, that often make far more sense.  

It seems that if there is a way to interpret a piece of media that paints it in a problematic light, even if it’s an interpretation that really needs to be reached for, certain people jump to the assumption that this was the interpretation the creator intended, or they act as though the creator should be condemned because it’s possible to have this interpretation, regardless of whether it was the creator’s intent or not.  

While it seems reasonable to say that a creator has some responsibility to consider the ways their audience will interpret their work, the audience also has a responsibility to consider what message the creator was actually trying to convey. Death of the Author is of course a thing, but if someone’s about to condemn a work and (more pertinently) its creator as problematic, the creator’s actual intent does become very important. Sure, something can still have unfortunate implications even if the writer didn’t intend it to and that can warrant some criticism, but it still reflects very differently on the creator if they actually intended a certain message as opposed to if it accidentally came across.  

What’s more, even if it can be reasonable to criticise a work for unintended implications it’s still unreasonable to make such a criticism if those unfortunate implications can only be arrived at by tremendous mental reach, which is very often what seems to happen in fandom. People will make a number of huge assumptions about things like symbolism in a piece of media and arrive at some abhorrent message and then claim that is what the piece of media is trying to convey, and that’s so unfair to the creators. It’s unreasonable to expect creators to have to wrack their brains for all the leaps of logic people might make when consuming their work to determine if there’s any way it could possibly be interpreted as problematic. This would both slow the creation process down to a practical halt and it would dramatically limit the number of stories creators would be able to tell, because virtually anything can be interpreted as problematic if you reach hard enough.

I’ve talked about the way fandom reacts to canon and official creators here, but the same sentiment applies to fandom (and hell, life) as a whole. Often fans get called out by other fans for something they said or a fanwork they created because certain parties interpreted whatever they did as having some sort of malicious intent, when in actual fact they had nothing of the sort.  

If we gave each other the benefit of the doubt, and asked one another for clarification on what we mean when we’re unsure of each other’s intent, instead of jumping to conclusions, things would be so much better in so many ways.

I think “performative social justice” is something that doesn’t get addressed often enough. That’s where much of the toxicity in otherwise well-meaning circles comes from.

What I mean by “performative” social justice is basically “discourse for the sake of discourse” - argument without the purpose of persuasion, in which abstract, theoretical problems are treated as seriously as if they were real-world issues. You see it in fandom all the time. I want to stress that this isn’t directed at anyone or anything in particular. It’s something I see all the time, from all sorts of people, and while I often agree with the points they make, I think it’s ultimately a pretty destructive way of thinking.

With the right rhetoric, you can make anything sound wicked. You can bypass a lot of reasoning and nuance if you sound like you’re confident that you have the moral high-ground (that’s the whole history of politics). And heck, sometimes you do! But you have to critically examine how you came to your conclusion. Nobody wants to seem like the bad guy, especially when a foolish statement can result in instant and viral public ridicule that can circulate for months or years - a pernicious form of Death of the Author. On Tumblr, the desire to conform to a particular opinion is largely motivated by fear. The punishment for deviance is often wildly disproportionate - I think we all know a few examples of things getting way out of hand. It’s seldom in response to things that cause actual, qualifiable harm.

Is there a fix for this? Maybe not on a large scale. But individually, I think it’s important to take a step back when you see drama and ask yourself, “Is this worth it? What am I trying to accomplish? Is this the most effective approach to achieving my goal?”

One of the great tragedies of the world is that there are very few singular, objective moral truths. The idea that two differing views can both be “correct” in different ways is deceptively difficult to accept. But hey. If ethics were straightforward and easy, the world would probably be a much softer place.

You’re allowed to disapprove of things casually. You can think something is tacky, in bad taste, or otherwise objectionable without needing to justify your perspective on a grand scale of good versus evil. You don’t need to use social justice as a method of signaling, to continually reestablish to your peers that you’re the Right Kind of Person only the Wrong Kind of People would disagree with. Be sure of yourself and of your beliefs. Accept nuance. A contrary opinion on a relatively trivial matter is not a personal attack, or an opportunity to flex your righteousness. Remember that the people you disagree with are often as vulnerable and well-meaning as you are.