IF GOD WON’T SAVE YOU I WILL

genuinely, honestly, I wish fandom could move past "depiction isn't endorsement".

because it's really meant to be sort of the baby beginner step to media literacy but in fandom spaces it usually acts like a trump card to shut down critical discussions. it's one of the thought terminating cliches of fandom that discourages learning how to interrogate the text beyond "fiction isn't reality, dummy".

yes, the popular whump fic in your fandom isn't endorsing torture, but also, can you tell when the canon for your fandom is endorsing a message? how do you then choose to interact with that canon, and do you get defensive when people are critical of the source material?

depiction isn't endorsement, but can you tell when fandom trends are misogynistic or racist? can you see how killing off a black female character to "punish" her in fanfiction with the framing that she deserves it, and the popular narrative in a certain fandom that a heroic black man is a possessive liar and a white villain is a good man deserving redemption, is endorsing a message in fanfic? do you argue that it's "just fiction" when people get very understandably upset at misogyny and racism in fandom spaces?

yeah, depiction isn't endorsement, but do you think this is where it starts and stops as the only thing you really need to know? do you think people who are critical of things aren't engaging with it properly, or being mean, because they've forgotten the golden fandom rule of "fiction isn't reality"?

nbc hannibal isn't endorsing cannibalism as a dietary choice, but top gun maverick and call of duty: modern warfare were quite literally sponsored by the us military as propaganda for recruitment.

I'm not saying don't enjoy the ip that's making you happy or calling for moral purity in your media habits or whatever. just saying that there's a lot to media literacy beyond the feel good affirmations that periodically circulate fandom, and those affirmation posts both lack necessary nuance and discourage people from engaging with said nuance.

Character: is a white man. That’s it.

Fandom: how dare you dislike this femme-coded female-coded gay-coded disabled-coded mentally ill-coded icon

[image description: tags reading #some of the people in the notes being like “me with so and so” #…besties do not #fandom criticism #text end ID]

This is a post about the racist tendency to focus on white men and project marginalised traits onto them rather than engage with the characters that actually have those traits. If someone is tagging this #me then they should think hard about there’s a pattern of their prioritisation of white male characters.

Nah I think some of you who mischaracterise Wolfwood *looks at his skin colour* so badly as Possessive, Overly Aggressive, grossly flirtatious or simply just scummy need to be detained by the way. We’ve had this conversation so many times y’all.

Also he’s shorter btw…if you even care.

AO3 has been down all day due to a malicious (deliberate) DDoS attack. As a reminder, they are a volunteer team working on fixing this, so if you've been at all flustered, irritated, or upset today that you can't access AO3, consider this your cue to float them a donation.

Seriously. Mark a reminder in your phone, on your to-do, or however you remember future tasks. When the site is back up, send them a couple bucks.

They have $1.7 MILLION in savings. Do not give ao3 any more of your damn money when they didn't even bother protecting their volunteer staff from spammed child porn images

AO3 Trust and Safety is terrible, the way they treat their volunteers is terrible, they don’t need any money, they need a complete rehauling of their whole working structure.

Rahaeli is the cofounder of Dreamwidth.

for the record I agree with what rahaeli is saying but I think you should know rahaeli has been pretty consistently anti-black, consistently lying about black critics about ao3′s racism and dismissing calls to deal with the site’s racism cause they’re ‘antis’

YIKES.

So basically, she is playing out the very typical behavior of rightfully critiquing an harmful organization, but because the Blacks/ the swarthy get involved, it becomes more important to shut them up and put them down than to actually keep up with what she previously wrote. With receipts. Should have seen that coming. Anyway trash individual exposing trash organization, more at antiblackness.com.

the dual demands for people to take fanfiction seriously as an artistic pursuit (commonly expressed in sentiments like “Dante’s inferno is technically fanfiction!”) while also demanding to be intellectually coddled at every turn, to never be criticised for their behaviour in online fan spaces, to never have any of their tastes or media habits questioned, is like the tumblr version of the same crowd who started gamergate, the types who want video games to be viewed as legitimate while simultaneously launching harassment campaigns against several women who, taking video games seriously as art, dared to make the bold and controversial statement “some video games are sexist”

I like zukka as a ship but I cannot go into the tags for content about it. why is everyone so insistent on making zuko a little femboy. so many people just see a long haired man regardless of culture/time period and call him femme. And they make sokka hypermasculine like hello????? he’s so fucking flamboyant ?? he wrote poetry, loved arts and crafts, wore a gay little purse, and did DRAG. in CANON. In a modern setting sokka would fix your car and then say SLAYYY do a death drop

if anyone else tries to insinuate zuko’s long hair inherently makes him androgynous/less masc I’m gonna start going around saying iroh has nonbinary swag

ok I wanted to highlight your tags cause a lot of people in the notes are getting carried away with “har har but iroh does have nb swag” when it’s missing the point that people refuse to see men with long hair as masculine, without considering that it’s the norm for many cultures, or the emasculation of East Asian men (esp in context to atla)

this is not saying “there is only one right way to exist in fandom stop telling people what they can and can’t say” but like,,,, consider Looking Inwards when what you’re saying has racial/colorist connotations and why you feel so inclined to say it.

there’s a leaked image of the gaang from the upcoming atla movie, and because it’s leaked it’ll go under the cut, but I wanted to show an example of the way people feminize zuko as soon as his hair is past his shoulders

writers and audiences have so much forgiveness in their hearts for white male characters who have done truly foul things while never once affording that same kindness to any other demographic of character

okay, you guys know i never engage in online discourse unless I really think it’s important to say. but i’m sick and tired of seeing these pro-AO3 posts that willfully misread what people are annoyed about. people are not unaware or annoyed about the fact that websites cost money to maintain. people are not unaware or annoyed about the fact that websites that do not run ads must ask for donations. instead, here is a short list of the many things people are annoyed about:  

– the fact that thousands of people are choosing to donate to AO3 instead of any of the very desperate causes that are currently going on, and that many of these are the same people who pay lip service to caring about these causes   

– the fact that AO3 asks for money to maintain its website and yet has been in Beta mode for 12 years, as well as failing to meet many of the very important requests by users   

– the fact that people are saying “well its better than anywhere else sweaty (:” as though AO3 cannot be criticized as long as it is marginally better than the next best option   

–the fact that AO3 has received over 5 times the amount of money it requested and yet has not announced plans to redistribute the extra   

–the fact that thousands of people decided to donate to a website that systematically fails to address the racist content and child pornography it hosts   

–the fact that AO3 and the OTW as a whole have shown time and time again that they do not care about fans of colour, and that fans of colour who speak up about this are accused of promoting censorship for wanting to be respected    the fact that by their own admission, it took them years of receiving requests to even begin working on a block feature   

the racism and the child pornography holy shit you supercilious assholes people know things cost money but they get annoyed when that money goes to excusing godawful shit