Rynling R&D

I don't ship Reylo because I don't have any particular attachment to the characters or the franchise, but every so often I'll see cute Reylo art or comics that make me smile. The pairing isn't to my taste, but a lot of things aren't, you know? I've blocked people whose work upsets me, but most of the Reylo content I see on Tumblr and Twitter is silly and harmless.

I'm therefore surprised by people who go out of their way to tell everyone that REYLO IS ABUSE, as if someone's stupid Star Wars ship is on the same level as, like, the U.S. Senate confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Honestly, the only thing I hear when someone tries to pass off fandom ship wars as social justice activism is "I don't like it when women have fantasies and tell stories that I do not personally approve of," which really isn't all that different from the misogynistic purity culture of religious fundamentalism.

Thank you for listening.

I had a strange experience recently, and it's making me feel weird.

There's a guy I recently blocked on Twitter and Tumblr for the normal reasons – he was bothering me and I wanted him to leave me alone. (I wrote about this a bit earlier.)

He sent me some emails in response, but I deleted them unread for, again, the normal reasons – he was bothering me and I didn't want to deal with him.

So then he starts leaving long comments on my fic on AO3.

I felt really attacked. They weren't mean comments, exactly, but...

...but they kind of were. There were a few things he said about my writing that could have been interpreted as positive if they had been coming from a friend but which felt extremely passive-aggressive when coming from someone whose goodwill I don't trust. Also, even if these comments had been entirely positive, it's still emotionally manipulative to try to use public compliments to demand the attention of someone who clearly doesn't want to interact with you.

Now here's the problem – there has always been anxiety at the back of my mind that I'm bothering people by leaving comments on their fic or reblogging their posts with commentary in the tags. It's one thing if I'm throwing love at a stranger, but things start to get awkward if a relationship forms and then becomes one sided. At what point does it become the more respectful and compassionate thing to do to just leave someone alone?

Anyway, I deleted the guy's comments on AO3 and sent him a very short email asking him to fuck off. Of course he sent several emails in response, which I deleted unread because I have no patience for what was undoubtedly sad puppy bullshit, but hopefully this will be the end of it.

I've spent the past hour drawing thumbnails for some f/f Zelda pairings I'd like to post pictures of for "Femslash February" on Tumblr, but it's hard.

Last year I got so many messages for so many months from so many people in the Zelda femslash community telling me what a bad person I am and encouraging me to commit suicide. If something like this happens once, it's funny. If it happens a few times, it's just life on the internet. If it happens at least twice a week for eight months, it kind of changes you.

People say that the best way to respond to online harassment is to not respond at all, but this tactic has the unfortunate side effect of making the violence less visible. And then, when you finally do say something, it seems like you're the crazy one for reacting so strongly. When I finally broke down and admitted to a handful of online acquaintances that I was being harassed, they said things like...

"You have to admit that they have a point."

"These people just want to be heard and respected."

"That's rude of them, but you have to understand where they're coming from."

In other words, if the extent of the harassment remains invisible, a culture is created in which the harassers are privileged over the harassed. This is insane, because I'm pretty sure the correct response to a statement like "I'm clinically depressed because I've been receiving death and rape threats every day for weeks" is not "You should think about what you did to deserve this."

At the moment I'm sobbing my eyes out, but I'm hoping this process will be cathartic. And I keep telling myself: It's okay to be gay! It's okay to draw gay girls! It's okay to be in a gay mixed-race relationship! It's okay to draw gay mixed-race relationships! There is nothing wrong with me... except that I kind of suck at drawing.