GO OUTSIDE
Jan. 15th, 2019 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis past August I discovered a Tumblr blog called Free To Fanfic after someone reblogged a viral post making fun of the author. Basically, some immature assclown had taken a screencap of her "How to Deal with Fandom Antis" FAQ page and captioned it with "GO OUTSIDE," the joke being that anyone who cares that much about online fan cultures should probably get a life. I remember seeing that post and being like, "WHERE'S THE LINK OP."
My main motivation for trying to process the weirdness I've experienced on Tumblr has been an attempt to figure out some sort of pattern. Like, why were all of these randos sending hatemail to a Zelda blog that does nothing but reblog cute fanart five times a day and occasionally post silly fandom shitposts over the weekend? If it were just one or two people, I'd assume that they were going through a rough patch in their lives and taking their anger out on a safe target, but the problem was pervasive. To give a specific example that requires no context or explanation, I got about two dozen scary messages accusing me of "animal abuse" for posting a commissioned marker drawing of Wind Waker Ganondorf holding a pig. What exactly was going on there? Like, this is definitely something bigger than me and my stupid blog.
I put up with this sort of thing for years, but my breaking point was being called a pedophile. I had seen posts like "Don't interact with me if you're a pedophile!" circulating within the Zelda fandom since around April 2018, and I innocently assumed that some drama had gone down on a ship tag. When I started to get hatemail calling me a pedophile for being a fan of Ganondorf, though, I was like, "...but that doesn't even make sense."
Because I had been staying in my lane and doing nothing more than reblogging cute fan art within the Zelda fandom, I had no idea that "pedophile" had become a codeword on Tumblr for "someone who likes a character or ship I don't like." The logistical maneuvering necessary to get from "thinks an older adult fictional character is attractive" to "is therefore a pedophile" was beyond me, and the situation got even stranger when people in my own small subfandom began to use that sort of hyperbolic language.
Discovering the Free To Fanfic blog was a godsend. What the person writing this blog has managed to do is to connect the threads of the various types of bullying masquerading as "social justice" on Tumblr. I hadn't been able to do this myself because most of the sources of this bullying lay in other fandoms (the Voltron fandom seems to be one of the primary sites). When the person behind Free To Fanfic put everything together, however, it suddenly made sense. For example, why was I randomly getting so much hatemail from femslash blogs and "Lesbian [Character Name]" blogs? Perhaps because exclusionary radical feminists have a long history of using the language of social justice to attack marginalized groups and people who are queer in "the wrong way," thus using ingrained prejudice to recruit people by making their own message seem more righteous. There's a lot going on here, obviously, but the Free To Fanfic blog explains it better than I ever could.
In any case, what bothers me about the trend of casually throwing around accusations of "pedophilia" is that there really are creepy people (like RationalWiki Editors) online, and creating a community in which a "pedophile" is "someone who likes a problematic ship" runs counter to the legitimately worthwhile goal of helping the younger (and not-so-young) members of the community recognize the warning signs of these creeps.
...and honestly, I can't help but wonder if some of the "fandom moms" who claim to be "protecting the children" aren't in fact borderline creeps themselves, especially in their acknowledgement of knowing the exact ages of the "children" for whom they're drawing and writing porn. I mean, it's a lot creepier for an adult to create smut custom-tailored to the interests of someone they know is fifteen than it is for an adult to reblog, like, a picture of sexy Ganondorf petting a cat or something. I'm just saying.
My main motivation for trying to process the weirdness I've experienced on Tumblr has been an attempt to figure out some sort of pattern. Like, why were all of these randos sending hatemail to a Zelda blog that does nothing but reblog cute fanart five times a day and occasionally post silly fandom shitposts over the weekend? If it were just one or two people, I'd assume that they were going through a rough patch in their lives and taking their anger out on a safe target, but the problem was pervasive. To give a specific example that requires no context or explanation, I got about two dozen scary messages accusing me of "animal abuse" for posting a commissioned marker drawing of Wind Waker Ganondorf holding a pig. What exactly was going on there? Like, this is definitely something bigger than me and my stupid blog.
I put up with this sort of thing for years, but my breaking point was being called a pedophile. I had seen posts like "Don't interact with me if you're a pedophile!" circulating within the Zelda fandom since around April 2018, and I innocently assumed that some drama had gone down on a ship tag. When I started to get hatemail calling me a pedophile for being a fan of Ganondorf, though, I was like, "...but that doesn't even make sense."
Because I had been staying in my lane and doing nothing more than reblogging cute fan art within the Zelda fandom, I had no idea that "pedophile" had become a codeword on Tumblr for "someone who likes a character or ship I don't like." The logistical maneuvering necessary to get from "thinks an older adult fictional character is attractive" to "is therefore a pedophile" was beyond me, and the situation got even stranger when people in my own small subfandom began to use that sort of hyperbolic language.
Discovering the Free To Fanfic blog was a godsend. What the person writing this blog has managed to do is to connect the threads of the various types of bullying masquerading as "social justice" on Tumblr. I hadn't been able to do this myself because most of the sources of this bullying lay in other fandoms (the Voltron fandom seems to be one of the primary sites). When the person behind Free To Fanfic put everything together, however, it suddenly made sense. For example, why was I randomly getting so much hatemail from femslash blogs and "Lesbian [Character Name]" blogs? Perhaps because exclusionary radical feminists have a long history of using the language of social justice to attack marginalized groups and people who are queer in "the wrong way," thus using ingrained prejudice to recruit people by making their own message seem more righteous. There's a lot going on here, obviously, but the Free To Fanfic blog explains it better than I ever could.
In any case, what bothers me about the trend of casually throwing around accusations of "pedophilia" is that there really are creepy people (like RationalWiki Editors) online, and creating a community in which a "pedophile" is "someone who likes a problematic ship" runs counter to the legitimately worthwhile goal of helping the younger (and not-so-young) members of the community recognize the warning signs of these creeps.
...and honestly, I can't help but wonder if some of the "fandom moms" who claim to be "protecting the children" aren't in fact borderline creeps themselves, especially in their acknowledgement of knowing the exact ages of the "children" for whom they're drawing and writing porn. I mean, it's a lot creepier for an adult to create smut custom-tailored to the interests of someone they know is fifteen than it is for an adult to reblog, like, a picture of sexy Ganondorf petting a cat or something. I'm just saying.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-15 09:30 pm (UTC)I've been following the anti-shipping thing for a while, because it's like the internet equivalent of a bad tabloid. Absolute garbage that does real damage and yet, somehow, I can't look away.
And yeah, some of those fandom moms/ 'safe adults' are absolutely manipulating kids. Even if it isn't explicitly for sexual abuse, a lot of those adults are radfems (or using so much rhetoric that they may as well be radfems) and they're using kids as a battering ram to take down people they don't like.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 01:03 pm (UTC)I have feelings about this, but I feel like I'll work myself up into a rampant TED Talk no one asked for. In short, I loathe people who do this shit and whenever I see a post calling someone a pedophile, I'm more or less doing this.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-19 04:59 pm (UTC)I guess I'm lucky I'm in fandoms where it hasn't penetrated. But I've got one person on my dash who has swallowed that hook, line, and sinker, and it is infuriating, because I see in the comments that anyone who makes the argument I just did is acccused of being a pedophile.
Which cheapens the seriousness of the real crime. I have dealt secondhand with two RL cases of horrible exes of two different friends who turned out to be pedophiles, and both those men are now in jail, and I still feel slivers or white-hot fury against those assholes for hurting people I care about and kids I don't know. Real pedophilia abuses and harms real people, not fictional characters. It is not what these antis think it is.
As you say, there is an awful lot of angry buzzing on short-form social media that obscures the real, serious problems we should care about and makes us too exhausted to deal with them.
And now I should go look at that link, because I suppose it's only a matter of time until I attract some of those anons, although so far my corners of Tumblr fandom have been spared.
I am so sorry you had to deal with all that harassment. It's weird, and it's stressful, and yuck.