Best Practices for Dealing with Fandom Harassment

- If someone sends you one or more messages saying that they will hurt you or encouraging you to hurt yourself, do not respond in any way. Screencap the messages, report the person, and then block them. Anyone who resorts to this type of harassment isn’t interested in communication, and any action you take to publicly address this behavior will be used as ammunition against you. It can be frustrating to allow this person (or group of people) to influence your behavior, but the best course of action is to remove yourself from the conflict by whatever means necessary, which may include switching platforms or temporarily going silent.

- If someone watches this happening to you and decides to remain friendly with the person (or people) who are engaging in this behavior, they are not your friend. It is in your best interests to minimize engagement with anyone who encourages or tolerates harassment, so unfollow or block them as necessary, and don’t respond to them if they immediately contact you to ask what happened. If someone who inadvertently becomes involved in a conflict really is your friend, they will find a way to make this clear, but you have to give yourself a sense of distance from the situation and then allow them to take the first step toward repairing the friendship.

- It’s important to recognize that losing a friend hurts, as does losing a community. Take your grief seriously, and give yourself time to be angry, mourn your loss, and recover.

- There is no value in wondering what you did to deserve harassment or whether you deserve it. If someone has sent you messages encouraging harm against you, there could be any number of reasons (from that person’s mental illness to the general culture of that particular platform), but those reasons have nothing to do with you.

To summarize: Privately document and report harassment but do not publicly acknowledge it in any way. Do not engage with the conflict and step away from the fandom or platform if necessary. The only thing that will extinguish the fire is a lack of fuel, and there’s no need to get burned in the process.

Moving On

During the summer of 2016 and the fall of 2017, I made a number of posts about some of the weird experiences I was having with Tumblr-based fandoms. I've been involved with one fandom or another on and off since around 2008, but I had never seen anything like what I encountered during the months preceding and following the 2016 American presidential election. Because I was not only witness to but the target of harassment (and because my job was extremely emotionally draining), I was hurt and confused, and my main purpose in writing these posts was to process what I was going through.

I made these posts public not out of any desire to create documentation, as I didn’t think anyone would read them; rather, the act of writing itself was cathartic. There was an element of venting, of course, and also a sense of validation in giving my voice a place to exist in the world. This was important to me at the time precisely because I was so upset, and I was doing everything I could to keep myself emotionally stable during a extended period of intense distress.

I don’t regret what I wrote, because the harassment I witnessed and experienced was hateful and unnecessary. Still, I’m not the same person I used to be, and I’d like to think that the other people involved in the conflicts I wrote about have moved on as well. These posts have already served their purpose for me, and they’re not benefiting anyone else.

I therefore decided to restrict a number of my posts about my experiences with fandom to mutuals. It’s not that I’m deleting receipts, as the posts still exist, but rather that I’d like to put those episodes behind me. If this journal is still here ten years from now, I would want to look back on it and not have to revisit the unpleasantness of what was, by all accounts, a strange twelve-month period in many Tumblr-based fandoms, not to mention the broader culture of online communities.

I don’t want to discredit the value of what I gained from these experiences, especially since I ended up learning lessons about interpersonal relationships and productive communication the hard way. I tried to address some of this in my previous post about dealing with fandom harassment. Again, it doesn’t make any sense for me to apologize for getting upset about things that were genuinely upsetting, but I really wish I had been able to deal with them in a more productive way.

I think that, because I was hurt, I ended up inadvertently exacerbating toxic situations and, in the process, hurting people who didn’t deserve it. I wish I had been able to handle those situations differently, and I wish I hadn’t been so sensitive about stupid nonsense that could have been avoided.

Chairman Rose

I did a deep dive into the Pokémon SwSh fandom and found two disturbing things.

First, people apparently want to fuck the monkey. The less said about this the better.

Second, Chairman Rose is commonly depicted as either someone who forces gym leaders to have sex with him for sponsorship deals or a gross and slimy “does charity work at orphanages solely for the purpose of grooming young children” pedophile.

Aside from some spicy art on Pixiv that was posted shortly after the games were released on what are clearly fetish accounts (and god bless them, I am not judging), I cannot for the life of me figure out why this is.

I don’t think I’m reading too much into the games (or “villain apologizing,” or whatever) when I say that Rose comes off as a dumb jock who somehow managed to get rich because people like him. If I were to read into the games a bit, I would say that Rose comes off as a dumb jock who somehow managed to get rich because the sports-related charity work he does serves as a charismatic public face for his corporation, which has been allowed to become a monopolistic conglomerate because the socialist utopia of the Pokémon universe apparently has no legal structures in place to prevent this from happening (which we know because it keeps happening).

Rose spends most of the game radiating doofus dad energy only to become stupidly obsessed with a stupid plan that he stupidly carries out at a stupidly inappropriate time. Really, Rose is right there with Archie and Maxie on Team Pokémon Villains Doing Stupid Things For Stupid Reasons.

Rose isn’t a creep; he’s a sweet man who means well but has too much money and, despite being obviously brilliant, is kind of dumb.

I feel like there’s more to the character, but I’m not going to write paragraphs of meta about a pokémon villain who thinks it’s a good idea to walk around in public in white Crocs.

As an aside, I think it’s really cool that Haruko Ichikawa (the artist who draws one of my favorite manga, Land of the Lustrous) created Rose’s character design. Ichikawa is also responsible for the gorgeous design of Rose’s collaborator Oleana which might explain why I want her to step on me.

2020 Writing Log, Part Five

- I did more admin work relating to the publication of my book. I should be able to review the proofs during the first two weeks of March. If all goes well, the book will be out for its scheduled release date in May.

- I also did some admin work to help get an essay I wrote about Twilight Princess back in 2017 digitized and in academic databases. The journal it was published in has a relatively small circulation, but the current editor is doing a lot of good work to promote it and get it out into the world.

- I posted Chapter 27 of Malice on AO3 (and Chapter 25 on FFN). I also wrote a rough outline of the current story arc. I've always known how I’d like the story to end, but getting there is going to be an adventure.

- I finished replying to comments on AO3. People are so incredibly smart and kind on that site, and it fills me with positive energy to correspond with everyone who has left comments on my stories. Now that I’ve responded to the comments on my own fic, it’s time to start leaving comments on other people’s stories.

- I wrote the first five stories for my chapbook of creepypasta short fiction, which I’ve decided to call “It Never Happened.” I’d like this chapbook to be the same length as Ghost Stories (primarily to minimize the cost of printing and postage), so I think it might only have thirteen to fifteen stories. I have enough ideas and drafts to fill a third chapbook, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

- I submitted an application and an art portfolio to an upcoming zine about Skyward Sword called The Path of the Goddess. I think the chances of me being accepted to participate in the zine are probably quite low, but it doesn’t hurt to try!

As I predicted, I’ve had to put a lot of time and emotional energy into teaching this semester, and I just started apartment hunting in Philadelphia. It’s therefore been very important to me to sit down every morning and, before anything, spend at least half an hour writing. I love doing this, but I had to make a firm decision to commit to doing it. I know there are other things I “should” be doing with the best hour of my day in order to be more “productive” at my actual paying job, but fuck that place.