Shipping Isn't Morality

[rynling]

(from Shipping Isn't Morality)
https://shipping-isnt-morality.tumblr.com/post/183726148328/yknow-its-been-a-while-since-i-made-this

When I say "abuse is the fault of the abuser," I don’t mean in just a pure metaphysical, "everyone's responsible for their own actions" kind of way. I mean that abusers start with their abusive behavior, and then fill in whatever behavior and excuses they have to to justify it to themselves and their victims. Maybe it's media. Maybe it's substance abuse. Maybe it's past abuse that they suffered. Maybe it's some psychology mumbo-jumbo about projecting past trauma onto you. Maybe it's mental illness. Maybe it's anything. [...]

Abusers choose to hurt you. They know that their actions will hurt you, and they choose to do it anyways.

Everything after that is an excuse.

This is a good post in the ongoing pushback against fandom purity discourse and respectability politics. I ended up reading through almost two dozen pages of this blog last night, and it was an enlightening experience. This person also runs an anti receipt blog (that posts screenshots of harassment, rape threats, and so on), and I admire that they're so good-natured despite having seen and experienced so much garbage.

I also found another good chain [here] about how, basically, "if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would've fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets."

I still haven't found much of anything that addresses some of the particular problems I've experienced in the Zelda fandom, which are much more intersectional than most of the issues I see discussed on fandom positivity blogs. I will keep looking, but it's been a journey.

I should qualify all of this by saying that I'm not a huge fan of the idea that fandom has to be therapeutic or serve some purpose in order to be valid. There's another good chain [here] that highlights the misogyny and homophobia of the assumption that female and queer fantasies need to be "productive" in order to be allowed to exist. Sometimes you just want to see attractive people have kinky sex for no good reason, and that's okay.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

You know, I've been thinking about all of this probably too much since you posted this. It's always baffled me how people think being a part of the purity police is ok. Then I was reading the second article you linked to and got to this part:

Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder.

Whoa whoa whoa. Hold the phone. What???

And that's when it hit me that maybe - just maybe - I had a wildly different upbringing than a majority of these people and that may contribute to this whole mess. I wasn't raised in a religious household. My parents got divorced when I was 4 and my dad and his side of the family were super Catholic, but my mom never brought me or my sister up like that. And whenever I did visit my dad and was dragged to go to church, I was always That Person who asked logical questions that made every middle-aged white woman there clutch her pearls (what do you mean I can't eat the body of what's-his-face with you guys? I thought you were all about looking out for your neighbors or something? I skipped breakfast for this nonsense and you're just going to let me starve? Well, joke's on you, I snuck in a box of Cheez-Its; they're better than your bland ass Jesus crackers, anyways this Actually Happened and I wished I was making it up). The point I'm trying to make is that never at any point did my mom point at some Evil Entity and say that's why bad things happened. Like at age six, I was told that sometimes people did bad things because they wanted to or maybe they had no other choice or they didn't know what they were doing was bad. But regardless, it was their choice to do what they did, good or bad or in between. It never occured to me until adulthood that how my mom went about this wasn't universal. If anything, most people got the "the devil will make you do it" speech.

And if that's the case, well... that kind of explains a lot about all of this. And it also makes me sad for a lot of reasons that feel... not exactly appropriate to word vomit out on social media, but anyhow. Or maybe it is. I just know if I start talking, I'll be 30 pages deep in that rabbit hole and still falling.

Also also, that first blog (shipping isn't morality) is amazing and every time I remember it exists, I spend like, a solid hour scrolling through it, because hot damn, that's some quality content.

[rynling]

Well, joke's on you, I snuck in a box of Cheez-Its; they're better than your bland ass Jesus crackers

Somewhere a gorgeous gay Satan with Cheez-It spray tan is cackling and drinking a toast to your good sense.

I've always admired Catholicism, but I guess I'm seeing it from the outside. From my perspective, it looks a lot like fancy dress and candles and chanting - witchcraft, basically - but then I read accounts of abuse and other bad experiences and shake my head to think that men people could have messed up something so weird and interesting.

Ditto with protestant Christianity. Like, you can talk to Jesus directly? Inside your own head? That's so transformative and empowering, and they get all these lovely seasonal rituals to celebrate their relationship to the divine! But then... yeah.

I think it's @freedom-of-fanfic who calls the fandom purity police "protestant evangelism in a gay hat," and that makes so much sense to me based on my own exposure to mainstream American culture.

This is a tangent, but it really bothered me how Tumblr developed a culture of lionizing youth activism back in 2016 and 2017. And youth activism is wonderful, of course, but the way it was portrayed was consistently something along the lines of "the young people have the courage to do what millennials never did because millennials are stupid and lazy." I understand that humans have a primal need to designate A Bad Group of People Who Do Bad Things, but it's been frustrating to watch the target of progressive outrage shift toward "allies who are not perfect allies." The way that mentality fostered an atmosphere of "people who ship these two characters are literally promoting rape culture" was troubling, to say the least.

I know I keep talking about the fandom police in an abstract sense, but I just keep having unpleasant encounters with them despite my efforts to unfollow or block people who seem like trouble. And the question I keep asking myself is why my stupid Zelda blog that reblogs cute Zelda art five times a day is such a target, like, why don't these people go harass Warren Buffett or something. Sheesh.

Sorry for the rant. But thank you for your comment, really! I love your fiction, but it's always a pleasure to read your personal stories as well. Just so you know, I fully intend to donate these comments to a museum one day in the future when we're both world-famous authors.

[runicmagitek]

Oh man, I can't wait to meet this gorgeous gay Satan so we can binge on Chez-Its together XD

So Much YES to everyone you've said, too. Because wow is it eye opening when you think of it like that. Also oh god, I already forgot about the youth activism stuff and the whole "because millennials are stupid and lazy" bullshit. I swear half the people who say millennial just mean "young person who is hip with the times and isn't a carbon copy of me and my shitty ways." I was on a conference call the other day that went over managing millennials and how to lower turn over rates. And the points discussed were summed up as "don't be a shitty human being." Who would've thought that not saying thank you now and then would make someone want to quit. "Well, why are they no call/no showing? Can't they give me two weeks notice?" They're literally giving you the same respect you gave them, Karen, which is apparently none, so....

Alright, that was my random tangent for the week

I love your fiction, but it's always a pleasure to read your personal stories as well.

Awwwwwww!!!! This was so sweet and made my day! Legit! Thank you! I'm glad my random anecdotes are fun/interesting to read. My mom used to tell me I should've been a stand up comedian, which sounds awful because anxiety, but if I was a comedian, I'd end my routine with the time my stepdad burned down the kitchen.

And on that note, I'm going to go write that up, because I have a feeling you'll love it.

[runicmagitek]

Boom. Enjoy.

[rynling]

THANK YOU FOR THIS.

[lassarina]

....god, I'm so glad some folks are pushing back on that entire. *vague hand gestures*

[rynling]

I'm glad too!

I'm especially glad that it's someone else doing this, because even the act of reading these conversations is exhausting. I considered starting a discourse blog myself, but then I thought about it for two seconds and realized how time-consuming and draining it would be. Something I've noticed about these pro-fandom blogs is that they devote a lot of care and attention to research and maintaining ethical standards. That's admirable, of course, but how much background reading and moral self-reflection do you really need to make that point that it's not okay to send death threats because of fandom ship wars?

I also can't help but shake my head when I remember what anime and video game fandom was like ten to fifteen years ago. Between Inuyasha and Final Fantasy VII and Homestuck, every single ship was over-the-top problematic, but no one really seemed to care all that much. Like, it's a wonder that I did not go blind because of some of the things I had to see with my own two eyes on FFN and DeviantArt.

[lassarina]

And yet, we are still having the Cloti/Clerith ship wars, apparently, in the year 2019.

I don't think they need it to make the point, but I can see it as a kind of....CYA? Like, one shouldn't have to be morally unimpeachable to make these points, but it's easier, in some ways, if someone can't go WELL YEAH BUT X IS VALUELESS BECAUSE Y. Humans are garbage, and playing on garbage people's terms is terrible, but I get why someone would do it.