rynling | Entries tagged with fandom

In Plain Sight: How White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Hate Targeted the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and Won
https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogyny-and-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242

We need to talk about how this so-called "fan backlash" is part of a larger movement to change and control culture put into motion by former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, in 2014. And it was a movement that successfully lead to far right governmental shifts in the United States, the UK, India, Italy, and Africa.

Leveraging over one million tweets and greater than one thousand YouTube videos, this article will track the successful rise of radical right wing hate, white supremacy, and misogyny in fan spaces starting with Gamergate and leading up to The Rise of Skywalker.

This is a long article that took me about 45 minutes to read, but it helped me put together some of the pieces concerning the spread of alt-right talking points in contemporary fandom culture, especially as this spread exists at the intersection between Star Wars and video game fandoms - and especially when it comes to antisemitism.

The methodology of the research is interesting to me, and I think the writer does a good job of striking a balance between "about two dozen wealthy and powerful people put a lot of time and money into generating online cultural conflict" and "they were drawing out conflict that already existed."

I guess what I'm still trying to figure out on my end is how alt-right talking points have appeared almost verbatim in leftist spaces with only a slightly different tilt. Again, this is partially a question of "who's been poisoning the water," but it's also an issue of "why are people so willing to drink poisoned water."

I don’t have the exact count, but I think I’ve paid artists for about 150 commissioned comics and illustrations during the past five years. This isn’t because I make lots of money (nope) or somehow had lots of money to begin with (also nope), but rather because I’m passionate about art and comics and creative collaboration. I understand that “passionate” is a word a seventeen-year-old would use in a college application essay, but I have a hobby that I really enjoy, and I don’t do it for the sake of “advancing my career.” I do what I do primarily for selfish reasons – because it’s fun – but I also genuinely want to support the online communities whose work I enjoy.

So, to summarize: I’m not wealthy, but I like art and want to support artists.

I feel like I have to say this as a preface, because I’m afraid people will read this post (or not read it) and jump to the worst possible conclusion about who I am and what my motives are for writing this. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to share my experiences with commissioning artists, because these experiences have gotten much better as I've learned from my mistakes.

I’m going to say that about 19 out of 20 commissions go well, by which I mean there’s good communication with the artist and the final product is delivered as expected. There are key commonalities between the projects that don’t go well, by which I mean (both or either) communication fails or no art is ever created. Here are the five major red flags:

( Read more... )

If a commission fails, for whatever reason, I think it’s important for both parties to walk away with no hard feelings. For me, this means not badgering the artist, not badmouthing them within the community, and not asking for the commission fee to be returned. In the end, commissioning art is supposed to be fun, and the ultimate goal is to support artists, especially early-career artists who are willing to create custom illustrations that even someone like me can afford.

Still, as I said, I’m not wealthy. I love art, and I love working with artists, but I’m only able to do so through very careful budgeting and corner-cutting in other aspects of my life. I assume that most people who commission art projects can sympathize, and it doesn’t benefit anyone to throw money into a hole. You can support an artist by contributing to their Ko-fi or Patreon, or simply by sharing their work. Failed commissions are tough on both you and the artist, however, so it’s best to avoid trouble before it begins.

I don't mean to hate on Prokopetz. I like Prokopetz a lot, so much so that I'm basing one of the characters in my original fantasy novel on his online persona.

But still, this post is making the rounds again, and I think it's at least ten times funnier when you realize that it exists at least partially because the OP has been butthurt for years about people having a crush on Magus from Chrono Trigger.

( Read more... )

If you're wondering why I don't actually follow Prokopetz on Tumblr, by the way, it's because I read his blog like a novel and don't want to get spoiled.

I’m having a lot of fun with The Magnus Archives, and gosh I appreciate Peter Lukas and Elias Bouchard a whole lot. I love Elias’s “performance review” conversation with Melanie, in which he smoothly and politely tears her down and breaks her psychologically, and I’m a big fan of how Lukas pulls out all the stops of his "friendly" abusive isolation tactics when he bullies Martin.

They are both awful, terrible, extremely well-written people, and I think they should be married.

I’ve had a wealth of real-life experience with shitty and abusive people, but every single one of them has been utterly without talent or grace. It’s kind of cringe how delusional they’ve been, actually. If someone is going to be evil and manipulative then I very much need them to be powerful and charming.

I’m not super interested in participating in the fandom for this ship, which seems to be overwhelmingly concerned with fluff. I’m very interested in writing about this sort of bad behavior, however. There was a post circulating on Tumblr not too long ago that said something to the effect of “if you write the characters as so OOC that they’re unrecognizable then you might as well just create OCs,” but I think I’d like to do the opposite. Namely, I’d like to write OCs with pitch-perfect canonical characterizations of Lukas and Elias.

Speaking of zines!

I’ve been spending a lot of time this past week sitting on my couch and riding out waves of bad feelings (this is the world we live in right now, what can you do) while hunting for Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. I just finished a second completionist run on the Switch version, and I didn’t want to delete everything and start a new game, so I dug my Wii U out of my closet and picked up where I left off in that version of the game in 2017. Along the way, I’ve been coming up with all sorts of silly haiku, like this:

a star fragment falls
as the lone hero watches
from a mountaintop

Haiku are a lot of fun and relatively stress-free, so I think it might be cool to make a Zelda-themed haiku zine. I put together a similar project for the class I taught about The Wind Waker in Spring 2019, so I already have the basic format set up and ready to go. If I were doing this by myself, I’d probably write something like 26 haiku and make three small illustrations (along with the cover page, front colophon, and back bio section) for a total of 32 pages (plus another four for the front and back covers). If I did the interior pages in black and white and used the same small format I used for the class zine, it wouldn’t be expensive to print.

I don’t have much of a following on social media, but it might be interesting to open the zine to contributions. I don’t have the time or energy to put together a big project, so this would be a super casual “email me your haiku and I’ll send you a copy of the zine” sort of deal, as well as a no-pressure “post your work whenever and wherever you like” sort of approach. I might also open artist submissions, with the encouragement that anyone of any skill level is welcome to contribute. I’d use Gumroad to host a free digital copy of the zine once it’s finished, and I might use Etsy to open preorders for at-cost physical copies of the zine (to be printed in addition to the contributor copies) if there’s any interest.

I’d post the announcement on October 1 and close submissions on November 30. I’d try to put the zine together a bit at a time so that I could send it to the printer during the first week of December, and I could spend the rest of the month getting everything ready to go before mailing out the physical zines during the first week of January.

If I were going to open submissions, what I’d need to do in advance would be to:

- find and commission a cover artist
- put together an information sheet
- create a graphic to use for the information sheet
- plan a series of three additional images to use for promotion
- create an account on Tumblr
- create an account on Twitter
- create an account on Gmail

And of course I’d have to write my own contributions in advance so that I don’t get stressed out.

I’m going to take the rest of the month of August to see how I feel, and then I’ll make a decision in September.

I guess, to me, theme parks seem a little overwhelming.

I can totally imagine flipping your shit at a theme park if you're a kid, and some of the rides seem interesting. I've been reading about Tokyo DisneySea, and the level of detail put into theming the rides (and the waiting areas for their lines) looks downright incredible.

I really enjoyed spending two hours with a friend in Namjatown one rainy afternoon while they were doing a promotion for Neko Atsume, but we basically got lunch, had a few drinks, got desert, chatted with some of the staff running the stamp rally, and left. We walked right in without waiting, and we were definitely ready to leave at the end. I can't imagine spending an entire day at a theme park filled with loud music and screaming children and endless crowds and relentless sunshine.

I think people who visit theme parks regularly probably have a strategy (or a routine) worked out in advance, though. Sometimes the Game Grumps talk about Disneyland, and it seems like they always have a good time when they go. It's also really wholesome to hear about people enjoying their fandom in a way that doesn't involve, like, sending death threats over social media.

I admit that I'm a little intrigued, but for me, for the time being, all the theme park I need is the state of New Jersey. When I was in grad school, I would sometimes book a carshare and drive across the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia to Cherry Hill to go to the giant Target, which was a solid hour and a half of hardcore Americana. I'm thinking that, when (or if?? oh god let's not dwell on it) a vaccine comes out and it's safe to go places without compromising the health of service workers, I might like to eat at the Rainforest Cafe in the Menlo Park Mall. I probably can't handle an actual theme park, but it would be cool to see what "theming" looks like up close in person.

It's Not 'Weird' to Be an Adult Woman Who Loves Disney
https://www.glamour.com/story/its-not-weird-to-be-an-adult-woman-who-loves-disney

The trio say they don't go to the parks to relive their youth, though. Smith, Puga, and Walker all have successful careers in creative industries and approach Disneyland like a city’s downtown rather than a family-friendly vacation resort. They're not alone: With a rotating offering of seasonal Instagram-ready treats, celebrity chef partnerships, and a record for being the single largest employer of sommeliers, Disney’s Parks & Resorts have a lot to entice adults with money to spend. To Internet savvy, culturally involved guests like these three, Disneyland provides the same experiences they’d have elsewhere, only better.

When asked about the stigma attached to adult women visiting the parks, they shut it down. As these three see it, everyone’s a fan of something—why should enjoying a roller coaster through space in an intergalactic Tomorrowland be so different? “People are always going to judge no matter what,” says Walker. “You just have to sort of own what you love and be proud of that. Maybe they’ll never understand, but they’re missing out on something pretty special, and that’s okay. More for us in the long run.”

I’ve been slowly making my way through Rebecca Williams’s monograph Theme Park Fandom, and it’s one of the best academic books I’ve read in years. In the Introduction, Williams opens the discussion by referencing a cringe-inducing opinion piece written by a gross older man saying that adult fans of Disney are creepy, which was picked up by College Humor and adapted into an even more cringe-inducing video.

I won’t deny that some adult Disney fans are creepy. In fact, I can think of a specific acquaintance right off the top of my head who collects Disney enamel pins and is creepy as fuck about their aquisition habits, as well as a certain Tumblr account that posts bizarrely sexual photomanips of the characters from Frozen. I don’t think this level of creepiness has anything to do with Disney fandom, however.

I’m not personally a fan of Disney (or Marvel, or Star Wars), and I have no real desire to go to a theme park. (Maybe when Universal opens its Super Nintendo World attraction? But probably not, honestly.) Still, I don’t get why people think fans who go to theme parks are weird, aside from the obvious misogyny and homophobia. It sounds like the people who are into this sort of thing have a lot of fun, and they’re not hurting anyone. I mean, sure, Disney is a giant evil corporation, but we’re not going to get meaningful anti-trust legislation by harassing people on Instagram.

So I’m not planning on visiting Florida or California, but it’s been interesting to learn about the different subcultures surrounding the Disney and Universal theme parks, as well as how the fans participating in these subcultures have made use of social media to connect with each other while actually influencing the objects of their fandom at a surprisingly high corporate level.

I know “serious scholars” like to mock Fan Studies as an illegitimate subdiscipline of Media Studies, but I’m getting tired of “serious scholarship” about How Disney Is Anti-Feminist And Poisoning Our Children™. To me, it’s much more meaningful to learn about how this culture is created, who is creating it, and how it’s not just Rich White Men producing media that’s consumed passively. If nothing else, I feel that good scholarship should be like a documentary that shows you a part of the world you only vaguely knew existed and then explains how it influences its broader cultural context. Theme Park Fandom is really enjoyable to read, and it’s been helping me make sense of all sorts of aspects of contemporary American culture that I’ve always found a bit mystifying.

I’ve also been reading Carlye Wisel’s various bits of theme park journalism, and I’m a fan. I wonder, how does someone get a job like this?

I was intrigued by the description of the novel Born to Be Bound in the New York Times article that I read earlier about professionally published Omegaverse romance novels. ABO Batman fic with the serial numbers filed off? Sign me up!

I didn’t realize just how intense it would be. I can’t imagine being a literary agent and being like, Yes! This is absolutely the sort of thing that needs to be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble!!

(Content warning for everything there is to be warned for, probably.)

( Read more... )

I’m mostly indifferent to romance as a genre, and I’ve never read the giant novels about sexy cavepeople that everyone keeps telling me about, but I’ve always enjoyed the work of authors like Jacqueline Carey who write dark fantasy with strong erotic elements. That being said, Born to Be Bound is on a different level altogether.

I’m not wringing my hands in moral panic like someone whose first encounter with female-authored erotica was Fifty Shades of Grey, and I actually appreciate certain Omegaverse elements like pair bonding and same-sex parenting. Hell, I’ve had to respond to people’s comments on my own stories on AO3 in order to explain that the characters do not deliver academic lectures on safe sex because this is fiction, not a manual intended for educational instruction in the current best practices for whatever community exists to serve a particular fantasy.

I mean, don’t like, don’t read. Your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay. Born to Be Bound isn’t for me, but I’m happy it exists for the people who enjoy it. But just, wow. This is not “soft” Omegaverse by any means. Instead, the author has dialed all the genre’s tropes up to eleven without any sort of explanation, reflection, or analysis. How in the world did this sort of thing become mainstream romance fiction?

During the past few days, I deleted about four hundred posts on Tumblr:

Posts where I reblogged people’s stories, meta, and art with supportive comments and tags, posts of original art and stories and jokes I made for people’s ideas and headcanons, and reblogs of people’s creative projects and commission info.

I applied the same level of attention to weeding my blog on Tumblr that I’ve devoted to developing my island on Animal Crossing, and it was incredibly cathartic.

I don’t need to see a snapshot of myself going out of my way to be kind and friendly to someone who thought it would be a good idea to send me a message asking if they could commission me to drink an entire bottle of NyQuil and pass out with a plastic trash bag over my head, for example.

I was never friends with any of these creeps. It never happened.

For me, the purpose of Tumblr is and always has been to create a small garden of things that make me happy. I scroll through my own Tumblr when I’m stuck in a waiting room, or during some impossibly long train or car ride, or when I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. “Interesting but relaxing” is the vibe I’m going for, and I think I’ve gone a decent job, for the most part. After all, I’m fairly skilled at catering to myself as an audience of one.

I’ve never been comfortable with the expectation to behave like a brand; and, regardless, activity on Tumblr has declined rapidly during the past month or so. I’ve gone from getting well over a thousand notes a day at the beginning of the year to getting less than a hundred a day during the past three weeks, and it only takes me about fifteen minutes to scroll through an entire day’s feed – if I even bother, which I mostly don’t.

What has ultimately come out of my social experience of fandom on Tumblr are lowkey but lasting friendships with professional artists and writers who have mostly moved to Twitter. I understand the value of online anonymity, but I think there are benefits to allowing yourself to be a real and fully-rounded person online. There are also benefits to being able to mute people, as well as being able to choose never to see certain tags and keywords. I’m not saying that Twitter is a good platform, because it’s objectively awful, but it’s become a much easier place to manage the social aspects of fandom.

To be honest, it’s because of Twitter that I no longer think of “fandom” as a discrete area of my life that needs to be contained and concealed as a shameful waste of time. I am a writer who writes reviews and critical essays about media. Sometimes I write fiction and draw comics. This is who I am, and I’ve found it much easier to interact with people when I don’t have to hide aspects of myself. I’ve also found it much easier to pick up the sort of high-quality freelance assignments that enabled me to quit the soul-crushing job that was making me sick.

Maybe it took me a little longer than other people to find my voice and surround myself with a supportive community, but I’m happy I’m here now.

Waking Up: Neil Gaiman and Toxic Fandom
https://thelearnedfangirl.com/2018/07/waking-up-neil-gaiman-and-toxic-fandom/

There is no shortage of examples [of toxic fandom]. Much of this behavior is based in misogyny and racism, some of it is not, and all of it seems to shriek, “You did not do what I want, therefore you are bad, and I am going to tell the world.”

This is not love. It is not even fandom. It is a mob.

Preach.

I should mention two things about this short essay. First, it's about the author being a fan of Neil Gaiman, not about Neil Gaiman himself. Second, it was written in July 2018. I was going through an intense online experience at the time and wondering what in the world I had done to deserve what was happening, and reading this essay then would have helped me a lot, I think. It's definitely worth saying that, outside of a genuine #MeToo (or similar) situation, no artist or writer deserves this. I'm tentatively hopeful that this sort of culture has started to fade, not in the least because we all have much better things to devote our time and energy to.

On "Fandom Moms"
https://out-there-on-the-maroon.tumblr.com/post/620585756682027009/fandom-mom-used-to-a-jokey-affectionate-term-for

I can finally afford to attend conventions regularly, pay amazing artists for great work, delve into more detailed media analysis, appreciate symbolism and homages I didn’t understand as a teen... and I should give that all up now? Because I have a job that makes me cry from stress, do my own taxes, and should be Looking For A Husband Now?

Oh gosh yes. Wow.

For me, as a queer nonbinary person, I was really only able to do things that made me happy once I had a stable source of income. I got kicked out of high school and then kicked out of home for being gay a few months after I turned sixteen, and the following twelve or thirteen years were a constant struggle just to survive. I couldn't watch television or play video games because I had to work all the time to pay rent while putting myself through grad school on a fellowship that was generous but not quite enough to live on. If I had time to "have fun," it was time I needed to spend networking by attending various parties and other social events. I couldn't afford to go to conventions, and I certainly didn't have energy to devote to developing my skills at creative writing and visual art.

I was 27 or 28 before I had enough breathing room to even think about doing something that wasn't work, and getting involved in fandom felt (at the time) like one of the best things that had ever happened to me, not in the least because I didn't have to pretend to be a serious adult.

So when I was accused of being a creepy older person (when I was 32, which I maintain isn't actually that old, not that it matters) for existing in a fandom space that was shared by people of various ages, it precipitated an incredible jolt of anxiety, like, what if it actually is Too Late for me to enjoy myself and follow my dreams? I had been getting this message from various places for my entire life - even when I was in college! - and it was a serious blow to suddenly start getting it from a previously supportive fandom community as well.

Also:

I don’t care if you’re also trans, “I only gender you appropriately if I like you” is still misgendering and transphobic.

I've also experienced this. I've conscientiously not disclosed my gender and used they/them pronouns since I got on Tumblr, but I've noticed that people won't hesitate to use female designations if they decide they don't like me.

I'm so relieved that this culture is fading... or has at least moved to some terrible far corner of Twitter.

A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html

As the rise of self-publishing has produced a flood of digital content, authors frequently use copyright notices to squash their competition. During a public hearing hosted by the U.S. Copyright Office in 2016, Stephen Worth, Amazon’s associate general counsel, said that fraudulent copyright complaints by authors accounted for “more than half of the takedown notices” the company receives. “We need to fix the problem of notices that are used improperly to attack others’ works maliciously,” he said.

In the Omegaverse case, Ms. Cain’s claim of copyright infringement against Ms. Ellis has struck some as especially tenuous. “They are not very original, either one of them,” said Kristina Busse, the author of “Framing Fan Fiction,” who has written academic essays about the Omegaverse and submitted expert witness testimony for the case on Ms. Ellis’s behalf. “They both stole from fandom or existing tropes in the wild.”

This article is a wild ride, and I enjoyed every stop along the way.

You can bypass the site's paywall by opening the link in an incognito browser window, by the way. It feels weird to have to attach that sort of "how-to-access" information for a nationally syndicated newspaper, but I guess it's appropriate for an article about commercial fanfic writers suing each other over their novel-length Omegaverse stories.

As an aside, Anne Jamison covers a lot of similar drama regarding Twilight fanfic authors going pro in her (excellent) 2013 book Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. There is nothing new under the sun, and what's under this particular sun is people taking their vampire and werewolf erotica way too seriously.

Anyway, the article's opening sentence?

Addison Cain was living in Kyoto, volunteering at a shrine and studying indigenous Japanese religion. She was supposed to be working on a scholarly book about her research, but started writing intensely erotic Batman fan fiction instead.

Relatable.

It never ceases to surprise me when I see grown-ass people treating fandom shipping drama like a serious social justice issue on their professional Twitter accounts, like

✧゚・Comic Sparkles・゚✧ @ comicsforsmartgirls123
A female-friendly podcast for comics fans of all ages! (*•̀ᴗ•́*)و ̑̑
Find us on iTunes, Spotify, and RadioPublic.
Legiturl dot com Joined April 2013

[Pinned tweet]
Rey//los commit suic*de challenge!
Go get a lobotomy you sick fucks :)

It keeps happening, but I'm always mildly horrified when I see the "follows you" button on a profile like this.

Twitter: What is wrong with straight women, Adam Driver looks scary and predatory

Me: Adam Driver is a toy for children. Have you seen

Me: Have you seen, um,

Me: *fans self*

Me: Okay but

I mean listen, they're all extremely attractive, this is not up for debate.

(Okay but actually, have you seen Daisy Ridley.)

I'm not going to link to this post, but I want to preserve it. Since the conventional wisdom is "don't feed the trolls," it's rare that anyone has the courage to be frank about online harassment.

What I've personally experienced was nowhere near this level, but I don't think Corseque is rounding up these numbers. When people talk about online harassment, they're not talking about one random asshole sending a mean anonymous message. Rather, once people start to dogpile you on social media, dealing with it becomes your entire life until that particular group gets bored and moves on.

I should probably mention that I'm a huge fan of this writer and artist. I don't care about Star Wars, and I don't know anything about Dragon Age, but I always enjoy reading Corseque's essays. In fact, my real and honest goal as a writer is to create the sort of story that Corseque would appreciate and write meta about.

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.

- 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.

This three-part documentary series on Netflix is really upsetting, and I mean really upsetting. It's difficult to write a summary, but basically, a group of people on Facebook tries to track down a man who posts videos of himself killing animals, thus giving him the attention he craves and inspiring him to post a video of himself killing another human being. The documentary itself is well-made and doesn't show the grisly bits of the actual videos, but it's still not a pleasant experience to watch. Thankfully, there's nothing particularly sensationalist about the project, and the "internet nerds" are presented as normal and intelligent adults.

The director has said that he created this documentary for the purpose of spreading awareness, which I appreciate. My experience with trying to get my anxiety treated over the course of the past year has been that a lot of people - especially people born before around 1980 or so - just don't understand how violent and upsetting online engagement can be sometimes. Even people my age and younger haven't responded well when I try to talk about this, and common responses include:

- Maybe the person attacking you has a mental illness. (That's not a valid justification.)
- Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time online. (That's not the problem.)
- Maybe you deserve this. (No one "deserves" death and rape threats.)

What I think people who haven't experienced extended episodes of online harassment aren't getting is that sometimes it's possible to encounter people on the internet who are genuinely scary. When you become the target of a person like this (as one of the primary "narrators" in Don't F**k With Cats does), it has nothing to do with you specifically, and there's really nothing you can do about it.

I also recently read the book Nobody's Victim, which is written by Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer and advocate for victims of internet stalking and harassment. This book is just as upsetting as Don't F**k With Cats, especially since many of the people Goldberg represents (as well as Goldberg herself) have had to suffer through intense and pervasive victim blaming. No one they go to for help understands what happened to them, and everyone thinks the fact that they became the targets of scary people is somehow their fault. Very few people believe what they're saying in the first place, and a lot of the evidence they produce to document what they've experienced is used against them.

I personally haven't been the target of anything as severe as what appears in Don't F**k With Cats and Nobody's Victim (thank goodness), but it was still very easy for me to recognize the patterns of how popular online platforms enable abusive modes of behavior and the hate crimes of disturbed people. I'm finally starting to see people within fandom share resources (like this) discussing best practices regarding how to process and handle these types of encounters, and that's wonderful, but I'm really looking forward to there being a greater awareness of these issues in mainstream society as well.

I know this is frowned on in the current culture of fandom, but I’m going to have to admit that I don’t feel any particular need to “protect” anyone who finds and reads my fanfic.

Even though I didn’t understand everything that was going on, I really enjoyed stories written by and for adults when I was younger, and I appreciated that writing for adults didn’t feel any need to shield readers from the more unpleasant aspects of human nature. I guess I’d like to extend the same courtesy to anyone reading my own writing.

I do my best to be conscientious about the stories I write and not include violence (of any kind) for the sake of violence, but I’m also not interested in excising something that I think is important or tagging a novel-length story with a content warning because of a brief mention of something upsetting in one scene.

I’m writing this because I’ve seriously considered it, though.

For the story I’m currently writing, it might make more sense to warn for content at the beginning of a particular chapter. Specifically, I’m working on a pair of scenes that involve a romantic encounter that develops in an awkward way. A major issue with communication arises, and it’s strongly suggested that one character may have had an experience with assault in the past. Both characters get frustrated and angry, and they do and say the sort of things that people do and say when they’re frustrated and angry. Still, I’m afraid that using a “nonconsensual” warning (or even an “author chose not to use warnings” tag) might give people the wrong idea about the story's tone and content.

I think that, in the end, I’m going to have to trust that the “Mature” rating will be a sufficient warning for story elements intended for a mature audience.

I have an idea about community building in circles of fanfic writers.

A lot of writers want positive feedback, and that's understandable. For me personally, positive feedback not only brightens my day but keeps me going when times are tough.

For whatever reason, however, a lot of writers who ask for feedback may not have a habit of giving any in return. I imagine that there are many reasons for this - some people are busy, some people are shy, and some people may want to focus on creating as opposed to consuming. I think these are all valid reasons for not engaging with other people's writing - or being selective about what writing to engage with. Like, for me, sometimes I get tired of Legend of Zelda and just don't want to read anything in the fandom. We all go through phases, you know?

Still, I think a formal exchange of positive feedback might be a healthy practice for communities of fic writers. What I mean by "a formal exchange" is that two writers agree to go to each other's pages on AO3, pick one story that interests them, read it, and leave feedback. The two parties can agree to the terms of the feedback upfront - are they offering to give each other kudos, a short comment, or a longer comment? Will they read a short story or a longer work; and, if they'd each like to read a multichapter work, how much will they read, and how many comments will they leave? What would be a reasonable timeframe for each of them to leave feedback?

This wouldn't be about serving as each other's beta readers or offering constructive criticism, but rather making a contentious effort to support one another in the fandom according to each person's circumstances and availability. I think that, for a lot of writers (myself included), it would be nice to have an opportunity to engage with other people's writing.

Profile

Rynling R&D

June 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 2nd, 2025 01:15 am

Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with fandom

Poisoned Water

Commission Red Flags

Villain-Loving Sin Hours

#Lonelyeyes

Legend of Haiku Zine

Re: Theme Park Fandom

Theme Park Fandom

Born to Be Bound

Social Media Self-Care

Toxic Fandom Culture

What Internalized Sexism Looks Like

When Fandom Drama Goes to Court

I Warned You About Twitter Bro, I Told You Dog

Unpopular Star Wars Opinion

An Order of Magnitude

Moving On

Best Practices for Dealing with Fandom Harassment

Don't F**k With Cats

"Mature" Content

Fic Feedback Exchange