A Golden Mean
May. 28th, 2020 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI’m currently working with someone on a comic commission, and it’s going great. We’ve developed something of a friendship, and over the course of our exchange we traded a few paragraphs about Ganondorf’s nose as it relates to his character design. I had a few years of research and observation to contribute, and it was fun putting everything in down in writing. I realized, however, that I can never, ever post any of this on Tumblr.
I first joined Tumblr because I used to love reading the essays people posted there, but the general culture of the site has shifted so far to “performatively woke” that it’s become really scary to say anything that might be taken out of context.
For example, this morning I reblogged an interesting post about how Lord of the Rings isn’t really “heroic fantasy” in the way that many people criticize it as being. The context, for me, is my continual process of working through the narrative structure of the games in the Zelda series (like so). What I’m afraid of, however, is that someone is going to read my act of reblogging this post as a defense of certain fantasy tropes with unfortunate implications in light of a recent (conversation?) (debate?) (trashcan fire?) about D&D on Twitter. A normal person would say, “That’s a crazy thing to think,” but the truth is that I’ve received disturbing hate mail for far more innocuous things.
The Discord interface continues to annoy me, and Twitter is deliberately designed to be awful and upsetting. I never thought I would say this, but I’m spending more time on Reddit these days. People posting there tend toward the pedantic at times, and the site sometimes feels like one of the last bastions of the “well actually” school of comic book guys (who are super annoying in the Zelda fandom, btw); but, for the most part, everyone is relatively sane and hate speech gets moderated out.
A week or two ago I read through an archived thread about how people in multinational marriages tease each other, and it was very sweet and wholesome. “One day I asked my Russian wife why she has to put dill on everything,” one post read, “and she got annoyed and asked me if I wanted a side of guns with my big American hamburger. I love her so much.” I’m in a line of work where almost everyone I know is in a mixed race/nationality/culture relationship, as I am myself, and it was nice to see people making silly jokes about how they resolve the tensions that can sometimes rise from different expectations, communication styles, and life experiences.
I can’t even begin to imagine what a thread like this would look like on Tumblr. There would be assumptions and accusations all over the place, and it wouldn’t be pretty.
The problem with Reddit, however, is that the person who is super helpfully walking you through the latest Zelda clone you’re playing might also be a moderator on one of the boards dedicated to political action meant to keep the American South gerrymandered in order to facilitate voter suppression. I offer this as an example because it happened to me a few months ago. About three years ago I received a similar shock when I realized that one of the stars of a Neko Atsume subreddit was heavily involved in an ultranationalist group operating out of r/The_Donald.
What I’m trying to say is that it sure would be nice to belong to a large and active online community that occupies a comfortable middle ground between xenophobic white supremacy and sending death threats in the name of social justice.
I first joined Tumblr because I used to love reading the essays people posted there, but the general culture of the site has shifted so far to “performatively woke” that it’s become really scary to say anything that might be taken out of context.
For example, this morning I reblogged an interesting post about how Lord of the Rings isn’t really “heroic fantasy” in the way that many people criticize it as being. The context, for me, is my continual process of working through the narrative structure of the games in the Zelda series (like so). What I’m afraid of, however, is that someone is going to read my act of reblogging this post as a defense of certain fantasy tropes with unfortunate implications in light of a recent (conversation?) (debate?) (trashcan fire?) about D&D on Twitter. A normal person would say, “That’s a crazy thing to think,” but the truth is that I’ve received disturbing hate mail for far more innocuous things.
The Discord interface continues to annoy me, and Twitter is deliberately designed to be awful and upsetting. I never thought I would say this, but I’m spending more time on Reddit these days. People posting there tend toward the pedantic at times, and the site sometimes feels like one of the last bastions of the “well actually” school of comic book guys (who are super annoying in the Zelda fandom, btw); but, for the most part, everyone is relatively sane and hate speech gets moderated out.
A week or two ago I read through an archived thread about how people in multinational marriages tease each other, and it was very sweet and wholesome. “One day I asked my Russian wife why she has to put dill on everything,” one post read, “and she got annoyed and asked me if I wanted a side of guns with my big American hamburger. I love her so much.” I’m in a line of work where almost everyone I know is in a mixed race/nationality/culture relationship, as I am myself, and it was nice to see people making silly jokes about how they resolve the tensions that can sometimes rise from different expectations, communication styles, and life experiences.
I can’t even begin to imagine what a thread like this would look like on Tumblr. There would be assumptions and accusations all over the place, and it wouldn’t be pretty.
The problem with Reddit, however, is that the person who is super helpfully walking you through the latest Zelda clone you’re playing might also be a moderator on one of the boards dedicated to political action meant to keep the American South gerrymandered in order to facilitate voter suppression. I offer this as an example because it happened to me a few months ago. About three years ago I received a similar shock when I realized that one of the stars of a Neko Atsume subreddit was heavily involved in an ultranationalist group operating out of r/The_Donald.
What I’m trying to say is that it sure would be nice to belong to a large and active online community that occupies a comfortable middle ground between xenophobic white supremacy and sending death threats in the name of social justice.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-28 06:27 pm (UTC)Without going into Too Much Detail, I found out A Thing that happened to a podcast/streamer I follow today and fell into a bad rabbit hole of Twitter shit surrounding it. I had to pry myself out of it and talk to my boyfriend for any hour about how disturbingly polarizing topics on the internet can be. Especially when people need to flex their wokeness and throw all rational thought out the window. If Twitter "taught" me anything today, it's that if I'm not squeaky clean perfection every waking second, then I'm an irredeemable monster and deserve public execution.
Also the more I see this crap come up, I swear most of those performing wokeness have minimal, if any, experience regarding The Thing they claim to be woke about :\
no subject
Date: 2020-05-29 11:50 am (UTC)I’ve been there.
I know how passive-aggressive it sounds to say something like “I’m sorry you saw something upsetting on Twitter,” but that sort of thing is genuinely distressing. As a decent human being with compassion and empathy, it’s difficult to see people you admire being attacked and humiliated for petty and ridiculous reasons, and it’s scary to think that the same thing could happen to you at any time.
I like to think that I surround myself with good people doing good work and just generally being chill on social media, but it’s difficult to avoid this sort of unpleasantness, especially on a semi-professional platform like Twitter where you have to keep yourself fairly open and accessible for the purpose of networking. Like, the person using Twitter as a toilet for shitty opinions about anime characters and the private lives of voice actors in the evening is most likely going to be the same person who retweets the job opening you need in the morning.
Thank goodness for Animal Crossing, at least.
Although some of the ACNH discourse I’ve seen on Twitter has been some next level bullshit.no subject
Date: 2020-05-29 05:25 pm (UTC)I wonder how much of that is related to the, hmmm, conversational/old-style-message-board-y nature of Reddit? It seems to me that the places where, for lack of a better term, older-Internet-interaction style is prioritized (Dreamwidth, Reddit, to *some* extent Discord depending on the server/moderation/etc, blogs with an active commentariat community) are a lot less....trash-fire than Twitter/FB/IG/Tumblr? It could be moderation-related or that people who want to have those kinds of conversations are moving to those spaces because they (ok, I) want to create space for them?
I honestly can't go on Twitter anymore. I know I need to maintain one for my legal name in case I ever need to job-hunt again because it's what you do if you're in tech, and I keep one for my fandom handle because like fuck I'm letting anyone out there pretend to be me, but. alskdjfklajsdf.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-31 01:53 pm (UTC)And many thanks for linking the LoTR essay here!
Also, I shall now use this threat of putting dill on everything if things aren't done the way I want them to be :)