Rynling R&D

So remember how I used to write all those posts trying to figure out how Tumblr works? Here’s another one!

I used to think that, the more followers a blog has, the more popular its posts will be. It only stands to reason, right? I also had this idea that artists have a lot of influence on Tumblr partially because of how the platform privileges images but mainly because of their relatively high follower counts.

I’ve since figured out that what’s actually going on is that a post needs to be “vetted” in order to spread. In other words, a post needs to be reblogged by someone whose taste other people trust. Or, well, “taste” is a strong word, as is “trust.” What I mean is that people are far more likely to reblog a post if someone they’re following reblogs it, even if they’ve already seen it posted on the original blog. If that “someone else” is associated with the same fandom as the post, then it will spread farther. In this case, “fandom” can be very broad; like, say, the “intellectual shitpost” fandom.

At this point I have far more followers than my small blog on Tumblr deserves, but it’s not my follower count alone that enables any given one of my posts to spread. By itself, one of my fandom-related posts might get forty to ninety notes, and it’s only when someone associated with the fandom reblogs it that it will get more than a hundred.

I’ve seen this happen on posts I’ve reblogged as well. Sometimes I’ll reblog something from a few months (or even years) ago, and it will go from having about twenty to thirty notes to having several hundred almost overnight.

Once a post reaches a certain level of critical mass, the number of notes alone will indicate that it’s already been vetted, and it will also be picked up by the site’s promotional algorithms. Before it can go viral, however, a post first needs to have community support.

I feel like the same applies to Twitter – albeit to a lesser extent, as Twitter’s septic open wound of an algorithm aggressively prioritizes a handful of tweets while hiding most of the rest, even if you turn off the “best tweets first” feature. As far as I can tell, Twitter doesn’t have the same “recommended for you” algorithm that Tumblr has, in which the posts liked by your mutuals – and the posts posted by people followed by your mutuals – will sometimes appear at the top of your feed. Rather, Twitter has figured out what types of tweets are most likely to provoke a reaction (generally negative) from you and show those tweets to you over and over until you either like them, hide them, or blacklist whatever keyword or hashtag they’re using.

Regardless, I’ve noticed that there’s still something of an influencer culture on Twitter, whereby people are more likely to respond to or retweet something if it’s already been vetted by someone they trust, even if they already follow the OP.

Meanwhile, Instagram is testing a feature that will hide the number of likes a post has received specifically for the purpose of protecting the mental health of their users, and I for one could not be more relieved.

Between one thing and another, I've come into possession of a small pile of evidence that one's success in fandom is disproportionately dependent on the amount of time and energy spent on social media. I'm an introvert with a more-than-full-time job, and I have neither the time nor the energy to spend multiple hours every day on Twitter and Discord. If you want your work to be recognized, however, that's what you need to do. The quality of what you create matters, but only if you know the right people. In other words, fandom is essentially a high school popularity contest. I had always suspected this, but finding multiple sources of concrete evidence was disheartening.

I should probably clarify that I'm not personally butthurt about any one thing in particular. All of my social media accounts are carefully curated walled gardens, and I'm surrounded by good people. And it's not as if professional spaces for creative people are perfect, obviously. I've just been feeling like fandom is a bit silly recently; and, if I'm going to be doing "work" on social media, then I want it to be useful and productive.

Now that I've begun my foray into professional publishing, I've been amazed at how tangibly rewarding it is. It's not easy, of course, but it's also not a situation where having thousands of followers and millions of notes on Tumblr benefits my life in exactly zero ways. It's also nice to know that, if a social media platform disappeared overnight, then my work would still be out there. As much as I appreciate magical screens that glow in the dark, I fucking love print media.

I've therefore decided to try to wrap up my ongoing fandom projects by the end of 2019. I'm going to work on and post one currently-unfinished story every week until all my draft folders are cleaned out. I want all of the fan art and fan comics I have lying around colored and posted, and I want all of my art commissions to be squared away. It's been a lot of fun, but it's time to move on.

I take content warnings seriously. Really, I do.

I teach upper-level college classes in women’s fiction, queer fiction, and horror fiction, which collectively contain all manner of gendered violence. I also teach non-Western fiction, which can sometimes contain depictions of politicized issues (such as race) that some Americans might find difficult or offensive. I don’t give my students a written list of content warnings, as such a list can be triggering in and of itself, but I do give them specific warnings in advance of a reading as part of the “housekeeping” announcements I usually make before I start class; and, like all announcements, I repeat content warnings in staggered intervals to make sure the message has a chance to reach everyone who needs it. I also try to be sensitive to the specific needs of individual students, who have disclosed a range of personal triggers from “portrayals of self-harm” to “vivid descriptions of the color red.” Making sure that no one in my classes is exposed to triggering content without reasonable warning is the easiest and least awkward thing in the world, and I genuinely don’t understand why there is or ever was a debate about it.

So, when I say this, I say it as someone who has devoted a great deal of thought to the issue and accumulated several years of relevant experience dealing with it:

I don’t think fanfiction needs to be tagged with appropriate content warnings in order for the author to have the “right” to post it.

( Read more... )

In any case, I still stand behind my main principle when it comes to fandom, which is that fictional characters are not real. Actual human beings, on the other hand, deserve not to be harassed for what they do for fun on the internet in their spare time.

(from Shipping Isn't Morality)
https://shipping-isnt-morality.tumblr.com/post/183726148328/yknow-its-been-a-while-since-i-made-this


I also found another good chain [here] about how, basically, "if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would've fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets."

I still haven't found much of anything that addresses some of the particular problems I've experienced in the Zelda fandom, which are much more intersectional than most of the issues I see discussed on fandom positivity blogs. I will keep looking, but it's been a journey.

I should qualify all of this by saying that I'm not a huge fan of the idea that fandom has to be therapeutic or serve some purpose in order to be valid. There's another good chain [here] that highlights the misogyny and homophobia of the assumption that female and queer fantasies need to be "productive" in order to be allowed to exist. Sometimes you just want to see attractive people have kinky sex for no good reason, and that's okay.

I like when people use Patreon as a tip jar.

Some of the most talented and prolific webcomic artists and indie game developers I know do this. They’re like, “All of our content will always be free and open to everyone, but leave a dollar if the spirit moves you.” They then use the platform as something resembling a development blog, with all posts unlocked.

(If I were ever going to set up a Patreon – which I’m not – it would be like this, I think.)

What I don’t like is when people use “reward tiers” to incentivize people to give them more money each month. That’s gross capitalist bullshit, and it makes scrolling through your feed on Patreon distinctly unpleasant, like, YOU AREN’T RICH ENOUGH TO SEE THIS POST LOLOLOLOLOL.

I like when people use Patreon as a subscription service.

I support a few people who come out with a new set of postcards or LINE stickers every month, and they use Patreon as a way to distribute them. I also support a few people who do this with their zines and use Patreon’s option of charging supporters by “work” instead of by month.

(I’ve fantasized about doing this, because I love designing paper goods and sending things to people in the mail, but it also kind of seems like a full-time job.)

What I don’t like is when people use Patreon as a subscription service according to reward tiers. This can go wrong in two ways. First, if someone shows something cool to people in lower tiers but then says YOU’RE TOO POOR TO AFFORD THIS, IT’S ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITH MONEY HAHAHA, that’s kind of shitty. Second, I’ve known people who say that they’ll send you their zines if you give them, like, $20 a month, but then they only come out with maybe one or two zines a year. I love zines, but there is no zine in the world that’s worth paying someone more than $100 on Patreon.

Basically, I hate capitalism. It’s not that I think independent creators don’t deserve support; rather, I think it’s disgusting how Patreon normalizes using exploitative methods to extract as much money as possible from people who want to support independent creators.

Why do relationship discussions and sex negotiations in fanfiction often look so fake and unnatural? Sometimes they can be interesting to read about but not when 18th century pirates and medieval Chinese warriors speak like they’re quoting some 21st century safe sex pamphlet or a PsychologyToday article.

https://dracfics.tumblr.com/post/182942644738/why-do-relationship-discussions-and-sex

Here is a true thing that happened: I once wrote a few sexy Legend of Zelda jokefics, one of which includes, I shit you not, the line "Shock me with your Deku Nuts!" One of the stories (such as they were) was about how Ganondorf forces himself on Zelda for all of two paragraphs before she gets mad at him for saying something stupid, thus revealing that it was all a sex game. In a short fic collection full of pure crack and godawful puns, the comments people felt compelled to leave were, inexplicably, attempts to educate me about safewords.

Why.

(1) The False Equivalency of Representation

Even if a fanfic has hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of kudos, it is never going to achieve the same level of cultural impact as big-budget mainstream media. No matter how much wholesome fic you write about Finn, it is not going to be the same as John Boyega’s face on every movie screen everywhere in the world.

(2) The False Equivalency of “They’re Just Fictional Characters”

Because “positive representation” isn’t really a valid concern with fanwork (although, in a collective sense, it absolutely can be, but that’s a different conversation), it doesn’t matter whether your fic or art is about Naruto kissing Sakura or Naruto kissing Sasuke. In fact, those three names are probably nothing more than nonsense words to 99.999% of people on this earth. It also doesn’t matter if you, as some rando on the internet, get off (for whatever reason) on the idea of Sasuke forcing himself on Naruto, Sakura, or both at the same time. They’re just fictional characters, and it does not matter to the broader culture. What does matter is if systemic structures of inequality and discrimination are uncritically reproduced in the fictional texts embraced by fandom without commentary. It’s therefore a false equivalency to put “I don’t like this m/m ship” on the same level of critique as “I don’t like how the source text marginalizes female characters.”

(3) The False Equivalency of GO OUTSIDE

Saying “I don’t like a particular m/m ship” is not only fine, it’s par for the course in fandom. Saying “I don’t like how the source text marginalizes female characters” is also fine, and we could probably use more of that sort of thing in fandom, to be honest. Someone writing about the details of their disappointment regarding a work of fiction is also fine. It’s okay to not like things! What is not okay is sending death and rape threats, accusing people of pedophilia, finding someone’s personal information and threatening to contact their family or employer, and doing things like creating a [username]gokillyourself account on AO3 in order to leave comments containing concrete instructions on how to commit suicide. It is a very clear false equivalency to suggest that expressing a negative opinion about a fictional character is “just as bad” as harassing an actual human being.

Gaslighting is the process of attempting to convince someone that their accurate perception of a situation is incorrect; and, moreover, that their supposedly incorrect perception is the result of something being wrong with them.

Based on what I've seen, a lot of the disagreement over this definition has to do with how many people need to be involved in order for an interaction to be "gaslighting" and not basic rudeness or dismissiveness. For example, if Person A says, "There's a strange smell coming from the kitchen," and Person B says, "No there's not, you're just crazy," then that's probably not gaslighting.

I would contend, however, that there is so much atmospheric discrimination against certain groups of people that even an isolated accusation of "you're just overreacting" contributes to a larger system of societal gaslighting. As a result of this atmospheric gaslighting, people in marginalized positions can sometimes feel that there's something inherently wrong with their point of view, especially during times of stress and vulnerability.

With that in mind, I want to talk about something that many American therapists do, which is to try to guide a patient to arriving at a revelation on their own, generally over the course of several sessions. I understand the theory behind this, but I still think it might not be effective in situations involving atmospheric gaslighting.

In order to explain what I mean, I'd like to give a personal example. I was in a toxic romantic relationship for more than a year when I was in college. Even now I feel as though I've been conditioned to claim partial responsibility and say that the abuse went both ways, but that wasn't what was going on. Essentially, the boy I was dating would push me until I snapped and reacted, at which point everything that was wrong with the relationship would become my fault because I had gotten upset. I had never been in that sort of unhealthy relationship with anyone before, so I had no idea what was going on. I therefore went to a therapist and told her that I was somehow causing my boyfriend to abuse me verbally and physically, and that I needed her to help me figure out what was wrong with me.

If a frightened and vulnerable young woman came to me and said this, my first response would be, in no uncertain terms, "You need to leave that relationship, because no one should treat you like this for any reason. We can unpack your feelings later, but you are in real danger and right now you need to get out. Unfortunately, what that therapist - and then another therapist, and then another therapist - said to me was, "Well, what do you think is wrong with you? Why do you think he hits you and calls you a dumb cunt?"

Even if this sort of thing isn't technically gaslighting, it still feeds into the pervasive social narrative that young women are crazy and irrational and deserve whatever happens to them if they don't follow an unspecified set of rules about dating and relationships. Between one thing and another, I had never found myself in a safe space where I could talk to other people my age about romantic relationships without being judged or causing drama, which is why I didn't immediately jump to the obvious conclusion that the reason why a man would want to strike his partner or call her a cunt has nothing to do with me, and that this is a conversation that needs to happen between him and his therapist.

Around this time I got on LiveJournal and discovered fanfic. What this meant is that suddenly I was exposed to all sorts of models of romantic and sexual relationships, good and bad. This was when I started to understand what was going on in my life. It's not so much that the fanfic I was reading explicitly said, "this is what a healthy relationship looks like" or "this is what abuse looks like." Rather, what I got from reading and discussing and eventually writing fanfic was that women's stories are valid, and young women's stories are valid, and queer women's stories are valid, and nonbinary femme people's stories are valid. No matter how transgressive or "problematic" any given piece of fanfic may have been, it was no less worthy of being taken seriously because you specifically wrote it.

That sense of being taken seriously and feeling valid is, in my opinion, an effective antidote to atmospheric gaslighting. I don't think fandom is or ever was an inherently activist space or even a safe space, but I do think it's a place where a lot of female and transgender and nonbinary people first get the sense that it's okay for them to exist in the world as themselves, no matter how weird or strange or non-normative or queer they might be.

I think this is one of the main reasons why the purity culture of anti-fandom bothers me so much. If people are only supposed to write "pure" relationships, and if they're supposed to be so enlightened about up-to-the-minute social justice issues that they need to tag everything they write with all applicable content warnings, then this is tantamount to being told that they need to police themselves at all times in fandom, just as they do in real life. In addition, because the rules about "safe shipping" are so arbitrary and contradictory, this feels very much like the sort of "Well, what do you think is wrong with you?" gaslighting that I got in therapy as a college student.

If we can call fandom a safe space, and if we can think of fandom as an activist space, it's because it's a space where the voices of people who are so often silenced, marginalized, and discounted in the real world are allowed free expression. In this sense, a sentiment such as "don't like, don't read" can be a powerful and transformative expression of tolerance and empathy.

I should probably conclude by saying that I understand that not all therapists reinforce atmospheric gaslighting through poor professional practices. Many of them do, however, and finding one of the good ones is not just a difficult and time-consuming process but also a community effort in many cases. I don't want to suggest that fanfic is an alternative to therapy... but it sure is a hell of a lot cheaper and more accessible.

I want to express appreciation to more writers through Kofi!

I understand why AO3 doesn't allow mentions of commissions or links to donation websites...

( Elizabeth Minkel, who is an interesting person and a boss writer, has a great piece about this on The Verge, by the way.)

...but I also think the double standard regarding money and fandom labor is stupid. This Tumblr post puts it nicely:

That’s why I write. That’s why, even if I got paid, I would still write with the same inspiration and dedication. Because a) it’s me paying it forward in the universe to bring someone else a second of joy and b) I can’t function without writing.

But I also can’t live on giving away my work for free. A lot of writers are forced to give up fandom entirely if they want to publish anything they’ve written, or they just stop entirely because they become too busy working a real job (or jobs, given the economy) and there’s no time left for the things they enjoy doing.

Erasing the stigma of fanwriters being paid is more important than some notion of “hm, did the writer really enjoy writing this or are they just trying to make some quick cash.”

At the moment I have complicated feelings regarding reading and writing fanfic, and I've always had reservations about giving money to people I'm friends with or share a fandom with. Still, if someone is posting writing that I enjoy, and they seem to be doing it professionally, and I don't know them personally, and I've read, like, their entire blog, then it doesn't feel weird to send some appreciation their way. A good example of what I'm talking about is Livvy Plays Final Fantasy on Tumblr, whose FFXII Zodiac Age playthrough has been making me very happy for the past month or so. I also enjoy POMEmag, and I don't mind occasionally sending love their way either.

I fucking hate Patreon, and that hatred is deep and multifaceted, so a part of this resolution is to try to figure out a chill and easy way of supporting people that doesn't make me uncomfortable. This resolution is partially about supporting fandom writers, but it's also about wading through my own stupid bullshit to figure out why certain types of interactions within fandom feel so weird to me.

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.