ok, because i just saw a terrible take, i feel compelled to say that there is no "fic market" to "oversaturate" in fandom. good gravy.

"he's like a woman to me!!!" not true because if he was a woman to you you wouldn't give a fuck about him

i feel like fandom would really benefit from adopting the idea of readings, as in interpretations. anyone can interpret canon as saying anything on even the most tenuous of justifications. if you interpret a detail or moment in a particular way, great! but if someone interprets that thing in another way, even in a way which directly contradicts your interpretation, that’s also okay. multiple readings can exist at once without invalidating any of them

a lot of fandom drama seems to arise from people acting as if their interpretations are True or Factual in some way, when really all anyone can do is speak to their own interpretations & experiences. which is natural! and good! many voices with many interpretations and approaches is healthy and good. the trouble is depicting a reading, which is a very personal thing, as universally true, and then getting frustrated that others don’t interpret events the same way. & i get it, that can be annoying, especially if you think those other interpretations are misunderstanding the canon. but so much of the time it’s just a different reading, taking into account details you might not have noticed or maybe just viewing them in a different light, informed by different life experiences & values & everything else that goes into a personal interpretation of a creative work

by trying to depict One Single Reading of a text as Correct, fandom loses all the nuance of interpretation & also just turns everyone into a bunch of rabid raccoons fighting over different ways to look through the same kaleidoscope

One of the sweetest things is when you post a new work on AO3 and then one of your old works gets a comment because it means that somebody read the new thing and liked it so much that they went and checked what other stuff you wrote and they liked that enough to tell you about it and I just think that is so fucking precious!! thank you thank you thank you to the people who do that, keep doing it it's the best feeling as an author

"why can't they just be friends" not in the homophobic way but in the "their platonic relationship in the source material is far more dynamic and complex than the sanitized personalities they gain as a result of shipping" way

"why can't they just be friends" not in the homophobic way but in the "this is a valuable exploration of intimacy and vulnerability that we’re conditioned to recognize only in romantic relationships but that can exist platonically as well" way

I understand this sentiment and I'm saying this in the gentlest way possible, but "why can't they just be friends" is still going to sound homophobic regardless of how you spin it.

If you nag shippers about why their kissing blorbos "can't just be friends", you sound exactly like Anthony Mackie, Steven Moffat, Kevin Feige and all the faux progressive douchebags who used the argument that male friendship is sacred, and why do you guys always insist on seeing romantic subtext everywhere, and also you just want everyone to be gay, to shun and ridicule people who want gay representation in their media, or who are even just simply harmlessly shipping.

Instead of saying "why can't they just be friends", write the stories in which you want to see these characters as friends. Draw the art, do the meta analysis. Chances are that the characters who you insist "can't just be friends", are friends in the source material already. There is no official story, no spin-off, not even an elseworld in which Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are gay and have a romantic relationship. They're always just friends. Same for Bruce and Dick, or for Jason Todd and Tim Drake, or for Damian Wayne and Jon Kent. If you're tired of shipping and want to see your blorbos being friends, you can always go back to the source material and enjoy just that, but the shippers who have carved their space in which their favorite characters are kissing, 9 times out of 10 can't go anywhere else.

And for the love of all that is sacred, stop saying "why can't they just be friends".

Yes, there are some ships I dislike and I would very much rather the characters involved to be just friends, including some of the ones I mentioned above, but I'm not going to bother the shippers about it. If I want to experience "their platonic relationship (which) in the source material is far more dynamic and complex than the sanitized personalities they gain as a result of shipping" (quoting OP), I can just go back to the source material and avoid be a nuisance to shippers who are just minding their own business and having fun.

Same shit (fandom does not understand that people can be bisexual) different day (today)

petition to start calling antis "censorshippers"

i've had so many conversations with people in fandom/creators' circles who are genuinely afraid to make the stories or art they want because they fear (often with good reason!) that their friends might kick them out of their circles, or worse, launch a public harassment campaign against them.

as someone recovering from this fear-based mindset, i want to affirm:

- friends who use implicit or explicit threats to maintain social control are not your friends

- communities that monitor your social media and ao3 to surveil you for perceived transgressive content are not safe communities

- the vast majority of people are NOT going to hate you if you make the art you want

- if you find yourself in a friend group that makes you feel afraid to speak your mind, it's in your interest to disentangle yourself from that group as quickly as possible

- real, honest disagreements between friends can be solved respectfully without the use of public shaming

- if you're feeling afraid in a community, it's likely that others are feeling afraid too. support your friends who may be struggling to leave an abusive fan or creative community, and let them know you're a safe person to voice doubts and disagreement to.

- if you're feeling like you'll never find a safer community of people, i promise there are others who feel that way too. it may take some time, but you'll find people who treat you and your ideas with respect. a good place to start is the people who make the type of art that you admire but that you're too afraid to make yourself.

ok that's all, take care of each other and be nice 💜

Sometimes I wish people in fandom would not insist that it is utterly impossible for any story to be harmful.

I agree that censorship is not the way to deal with harmful stories, and also that so many stories called harmful actually aren't. (Desire and sex are not inherently harmful.) However...

A story about how Martha Jones as a Black girl is obviously too stupid to be a doctor is harmful. A story about how Lt. Uhura is an evil bitch who should be thrown off the <i>Enterprise</i> ASAP is harmful. A story about Tony Stark taking over Wakanda because Africans are incapable of managing valuable resources without squandering them is harmful. All those stories I had to wade through when I first got into slash, where the female canon love interests were Flanderized into horrible harpies to "justify" the slash, those were harmful.

Stories which drag real-world bigotry into fandom and present it as truth to massive accolades are harmful. Especially in a way that stories that use kinks that are rightfully seen as inexcusable IRL are not.

The response to such stories is not censorship, for a whole bunch of reasons I'm not getting into at the moment, but it does make it harder to deal with such stories, and to feel welcome as a POC in fandom at all, when people insist no such harm can exist. My AO3 # is in the low four digits but sometimes I wonder if the rest of my fellow AO3 denizens think POC belong there at all.

I'm white, so not the best expert on racism, but it seems to me that there are two types of harm when we talk about harm caused by media. One is the big picture harm: does this piece of art make the world a worse place? Does it harm society? Does it encourage people to hurt one another in a way that will have actual real-world consequences? And that's an important conversation, but generally if it's going to have a real world impact of that category a) it's got to be something a lot more mainstream than fan works and b) it's going to be reflecting and amplifying things that lots of people already believe. Like Jaws encouraging people to hate and fear (and hunt) sharks. It's not creating that belief out of a vacuum.

But there's a second type of harm, and that is "does this piece of art make people within the community feel less safe? does it make them actually less safe? does it isolate them? is it contributing to their marginalization? does it encourage and embolden people within the community to be their worst selves to other people within the community? And fanfic can and does do that.

I don't think the answer is censorship, either. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we need to be paying attention and talking about it.

This whole thread by Dr. Pande ("Squee from the Margins") is on point, and it doesn't let anyone off. It's not just other corners of the fandom, as much as people love to say that they never see racism so they must be doing something right. If you never see it, you probably don't see it when it happens.

anyone have a link to the thread?

Click on "View on Twitter" above :)

Yeah clicking they just tells me they have limited who can see their posts. And I, despite being logged in, cannot.

Oh sorry, I didn't notice the lock icon. To paraphrase the rest, she pointed out that fandoms will sometimes push back against overt racism against characters of color, but as soon as someone points out shipping patterns that erase or undervalue characters of color, they're labeled an "anti," an enemy of fandom itself (something I've experienced first hand). And basically that until that stops, saying that fandoms broadly work against white supremacy is not true or productive.

multi-fandom fest called "dead man's party" and it's all fandoms that haven't had new source material in 10+ years. who's in

Star Trek grandma

Betcha Grandma was writing original k/s slashfic decades before you kiddies were born.

Yes @ceruleanteacup , Grandma was

“why can’t two guys be platonic best friends in peace?” THEY ARE platonic bestfriends. you guys really need to understand that no amount of shipping will change that, canon will stay unchanged so what’s the whining for?

this ‘problem’ only exists in your mind. hope this helps!

Sometimes I wish people in fandom would not insist that it is utterly impossible for any story to be harmful.

I agree that censorship is not the way to deal with harmful stories, and also that so many stories called harmful actually aren't. (Desire and sex are not inherently harmful.) However...

A story about how Martha Jones as a Black girl is obviously too stupid to be a doctor is harmful. A story about how Lt. Uhura is an evil bitch who should be thrown off the <i>Enterprise</i> ASAP is harmful. A story about Tony Stark taking over Wakanda because Africans are incapable of managing valuable resources without squandering them is harmful. All those stories I had to wade through when I first got into slash, where the female canon love interests were Flanderized into horrible harpies to "justify" the slash, those were harmful.

Stories which drag real-world bigotry into fandom and present it as truth to massive accolades are harmful. Especially in a way that stories that use kinks that are rightfully seen as inexcusable IRL are not.

The response to such stories is not censorship, for a whole bunch of reasons I'm not getting into at the moment, but it does make it harder to deal with such stories, and to feel welcome as a POC in fandom at all, when people insist no such harm can exist. My AO3 # is in the low four digits but sometimes I wonder if the rest of my fellow AO3 denizens think POC belong there at all.

I'm white, so not the best expert on racism, but it seems to me that there are two types of harm when we talk about harm caused by media. One is the big picture harm: does this piece of art make the world a worse place? Does it harm society? Does it encourage people to hurt one another in a way that will have actual real-world consequences? And that's an important conversation, but generally if it's going to have a real world impact of that category a) it's got to be something a lot more mainstream than fan works and b) it's going to be reflecting and amplifying things that lots of people already believe. Like Jaws encouraging people to hate and fear (and hunt) sharks. It's not creating that belief out of a vacuum.

But there's a second type of harm, and that is "does this piece of art make people within the community feel less safe? does it make them actually less safe? does it isolate them? is it contributing to their marginalization? does it encourage and embolden people within the community to be their worst selves to other people within the community? And fanfic can and does do that.

I don't think the answer is censorship, either. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we need to be paying attention and talking about it.

I think most of the worst harm in fiction comes from the influence of tropes or ideas that are not depicted as harmful and tend not to be recognized as harmful to the reader. This depends both on the story itself, and the cultural context. It's very personal; one person might read a story and clearly see the context necessary to understand that a certain behavior in the story is harmful, whereas another person might read the same story and miss that, and wrongly conclude that the same behavior is okay.

I agree that censorship is not the answer.

What is the answer, then?

I think it's a culture of reflection and discussion. Read or watch controversial or problematic works in school, and discuss them in class. Study topics related to the whatever behaviors or ideas or depictions in the story are potentially harmful or problematic.

Discuss popular works casually too, amongst friends. Discuss them publicly, on social media. Society already does this. Like when 50 Shades of Gray came out, there was so much talk about how it depicted something abusive, and presented it in such a way that people would wrongly conclude that it was "normal" BDSM, and the BDSM community was in uproar about it. And as a result, a lot of discussion about what is and isn't healthy BDSM practice broke into the mainstream and that was absolutely fantastic. Like you had families sitting around the dinner table talking about BDSM and whether or not that book was an accurate depiction of healthy BDSM and frankly I think that's pretty awesome.

I want us to keep doing it and I want us to do more of it.

I think it's worth brainstorming and highlighting some of the many different ways a fictional work could cause harm. Not because I want any of them to be censored, but because I want us to talk about that harm so as to prevent it. Here are some that come to mind:

I'm sure there are more possibilities too.

People who hate on reader inserts will not survive the winter.

Fanfiction writers keep your fandoms alive, and that includes reader inserts writers.

It’s not my cup of tea but a lot of what I read and write isn’t gonna be your cup of tea! Reader insert writers are some of the most talented writers alive I could not write in that style/pov. Y’all absolutely crushing it.

My feelings on the slash ships vs male friendships argument that occasionally pops up is that if other people shipping two male characters with each other genuinely ruins your ability to appreciate the intimate male friendship depicted in canon, that says a lot more about your personal anxieties and insecurities than it does about shippers or culture at large

The argument is typically about devaluation of friendships, right? that imposing romance/sex on these canonically non-romantic, non-sexual relationships between men implies that friendship without those elements is "lesser" or "not enough"

And I am sympathetic to a fruatration with devaluation of friendship and I do agree that the language shippers use or the argument they put forth in favour of why their ship is a valid reading of the text or going to become canon or whatever, that this is sometimes language or arguments that imply the superiority of romance and sex over relationships without those features

But the thing about it is that

1) the canon version of the relationship in question typically is a non-sexual, non-romantic one, the mainstream version of this story is one that puts emphasis on and values male friendship, which is prove in and of itself that there is no danger of stories about the importance of male friensships drying up

2) this is an issue far, far more prevalent in the depiction of relationships between men and women, like there actually is a lack of stories that center non-romantic, non-sexual male-female friendships, there genuinely are people who see every non-familial male-female interaction in the light of romance, yet it's the slash ships that get hit with this accusation of devaluing friendship

At the end of the day, how other people interpret a piece of media really doesn't have to affect your own relationship to a piece of media. It's perfectly fine not to like a ship! It's not homophobic to prefer a male friendship to a gay romance. Getting angry about other people engaging "incorrectly" with a fiction relationship is immature and in the case of the "devalueing male friendships" argument it is also homophobic

I have a straight male friend who really values Frodo and Sam's friendship and who doesn't personally read it as romantic, who indeed is a man with intimate, non-sexual, non-romantic relationship with other men and thus find that interpretation personally meaningful. But he's not immature or a homophobe, so he doesn't feel the need to complain or argue if someone else makes a reference to them as a couple in his presence. We all agree that the relationship is important and endearing, why would we have to agree on the particulars of whether they fuck or not?

If you find shippers annoying, that's perfectly reasonable because shippers often are annoying (I say as a shipper). But at the end of the day, the only reason to position slash interpretations and platonic interpretations as enemies is homophobia

I have come to realize that, to me, one of the worst crimes a piece of fiction can commit is being mean-spirited. Just about anything else can be good in certain circumstances. But a mean-spirited work diminishes anyone who encounters it.