Bless This Artist

A clever method of getting around Tumblr's NSFW ban, I have found it:

https://kim-ed.tumblr.com/post/182019246266/ganon

It works either way, I'm just saying.

For the click-adverse, this is a picture of Wind Waker Ganondorf in bed reclining against some fancy pillows. His robe is open, he's blushing, and in his lap he's stroking a cat that is small for a cat but rather large for a... I mean. You know.

I guess a large scary man petting an animal is the lady fan service equivalent of a doe-eyed preteen anime girl licking a popsicle, but instead of being weird and creepy I think it's actually kind of sweet.

Now that Tumblr is obsessed with "child abuse" (this is really disturbing, by the way, and I should write more about it later ETA: so I did), I propose a motion to create more sexy content of Ganondorf. He is, after all, one of the only adult characters in the Zelda series, and I think at this point a vote has been taken and we have all collectively agreed that he's hot.

The RationalWiki Editor

I love how nobody thinks twice about including Sonic the Hedgehog in a lineup of classic Nintendo characters these days. It’s like an enemies-to-bros fanfic arc in mascot form.
https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/173329671862/prokopetz-prokopetz-i-love-how-nobody-thinks

Shadow isn’t anybody’s current boyfriend. Shadow is the hedgehog equivalent of the guy you dated for like six months back in high school and then didn’t hear from for ten years, and when you finally make contact again you find out that they’re a full-time RationalWiki editor on probation for a vehicular assault conviction stemming from ramming their Prius into a Dairy Queen drivethru kiosk in a bizarre road rage incident, and you’re like wow, bullet dodged.

I don't know anything about Sonic or Shadow, but "RationalWiki Editor" is totally a character type. I've spent a fair amount time on various gaming forums exchanging questions and answers about Japanese mobile games and Zelda speedruns, and I'm constantly crossing paths with people like this. They'll be intelligent and articulate and knowledgeable and witty, but then you'll see them making a bunch of posts on another board vigorously defending, like, eugenics.

A representative example of the "RationalWiki Editor" is Eliezer Yudkowsky, the LessWrong guy who wrote a 660,000k fanfic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (I will not link to it, but it has its own page on Wikipedia, because of course it does). The Methods of Rationality, which is mainly about the intersection of magic with politics and science, seemed interesting when it first began serialization in 2010, but it gradually devolved into a platform for charming opinions such as "gender discrimination doesn't exist because of Social Darwinism."

Between one thing and another, I've also known a few people like this in real life, and I think it's fair to say that their particular brand of sociopathic charm is not limited to the internet. They are super creepy in real life as well, and the most disturbing thing about them is that it's not always easy to see their damage if you either don't know them that well or don't know the warning signs. Honestly though, there's so much gaslighting that people who are not male are subjected to on a daily basis (like, "there's nothing wrong, you're just overreacting") that it can be difficult to trust your instincts about these people even if you do know them well and can see the warning signs clearly.

I mention this because I'm beginning to suspect that maybe David J. Prokopetz himself might be a softer version of the "RationalWiki Editor" archetype: the "Woke Liberal Male" who doesn't really like women all that much. This is a dude who respects and appreciates smart and strong and independent women; but, when one of these smart and strong and independent women writes fanfic about Shadow the Hedgehog or Magus from Chrono Trigger or one of the edgelords from Kingdom Hearts, that's ridiculous and disgusting because it's, idk, anti-feminist.

But who knows. Maybe there's nothing wrong, and I'm just overreacting. Gaslighting aside, that does indeed happen, but a lovely side effect of being exposed to constant atmospheric sexism that sometimes you just can't tell. I personally hope Prokopetz isn't an asshole, because I really like his blog. It's also admittedly a weird experience to read someone's blog backwards, which can result in what seems like reverse character development.

For what it's worth, I think the fantasy of romancing a Byronic antihero is that he secretly worships you instead of secretly worshiping Ayn Rand; it's not "you can change him," but rather that he was a secret feminist/queer rights activist all along and just needed the right person to come along and rescue him from the high and lonely tower of the patriarchy.

GO OUTSIDE

This 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.