#AT LEAST be up-front about how large a slice of the nonsense you're actually leveraging | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whetstonefires · 3 years

Text

Now, I have...basically 0 stake in Batman in a Christmas sweater. I tend to find most Christmas fan art insufferably twee. My quality of life would be basically unaffected by the magical disappearance of all batfam fan content depicting them celebrating Christmas, and probably improved by less Christian batman stuff in general.

But I have a lot of stake in the misuse of ‘canonically’ in fandom, especially when tied to harassment.

The thing is.

Canonically, Batman has been celebrating Christmas, on-panel, for roughly eight decades.

Canonically, his mother is almost definitely Jewish.

Canonically, his father is not. Technically this is more canon, if there is such a thing, because it’s been shown rather than stated in framework terms, but none of those ‘memories of my father taking me to church’ etc were consistent with one another, so it’s whatever. Comics.

Additionally his mother seems to have gone to the trouble of ensuring that her son would not go into her family’s custody in the event of her death, and he has never been depicted as having a warm or close relationship with them despite living in the same city. Which is a whole accidental can of retcon worms on DC’s part lol.

Canonically, Kate celebrates Hannukah and Bruce does not. She has her own personalized Batwoman gelt.

If we are deriving our conclusion from the canon, Bruce’s relationship with Judaism-and-self falls somewhere between near-indifference and hella-complicated.

Now, I’m all the way here for the hella complicated! I’d love to dig into it, but that’s not my place. And because this is DC Comics and canon is a lie, there is absolutely no reason people cannot ignore all of that canon and depict him as actively practicing Judaism and observing the holy days in accordance with any strain of tradition, and bringing his kids in on it and the whole deal.

Maybe doing that thing people apparently sometimes do of escalating gift-giving throughout the eight days of Hannukah, and at the end since he’s a billionaire everyone gets their own luxury car. Even those too young to legally drive. Has anyone written that? I want to read it.

Anyway cherry-picking canon is a great and fundamental part of our fan community and the fact that you need to cherry-pick super heavily to get that form of Jewish Batman is absolutely no barrier to using it in fanworks. Jewish Batman content is great and I value it and it would be neat if it continued to catch on, and if DC actually engaged with it in a comic at some point even.

But approaching other fans in proscriptive terms is bad form, and should be reserved for extreme and unambiguous situations. Making flat statements about what other fans morally should be allowed to do is an extreme act likely to have fallout if anyone listens to you, and should be saved for extreme cases.

Especially when as in this case it has an immediate, recent history of provoking harassment campaigns.

Now, of course, stating a ‘fact’ to raise awareness with people about what they personally should not in your opinion do is everyone’s right, and is not in itself endorsing harassment.

But in the immediate historical context of ‘batman fandom on tumblr’ this misleading statement did in fact require heavy qualification for our wellbeing as a community. Probably gecko could have phrased it better, but in this context it badly needed saying. That post as written amounted to misinformation.

And the use of social justice language, guilt-tripping, and extremely vague additional citations for authority in response to (successfully) invalidate the attempt to clarify the misinformation, while completely understandable from the emotional space of ‘mad about erasure,’ did not impress me much. Which is why I weighed in on that other post.

(I also could have phrased my point better if I’d been in a more focused frame of mind, but it also clearly wouldn’t have mattered because the responses are entirely focused on ‘demonstrating why batman can in fact only be depicted in one specific way and this is why disagreeing at all makes you a bad person;’ constructive dialogue wasn’t happening.)

So. It is, in fact, appropriate to depict Batman doing Christmas, if you want to. And if it was not, ‘canon’ would still be a very bad argument against it. He has celebrated umpteen Christmasses, canonically. This is not a matter of ‘the default,’ it is a matter of established Batman behavior.

I mean, he’s been written that way because our culture is how it is, but he has been written that way. Still is. This week’s Nightwing was a holiday issue which featured Bruce asking Dick to come home tomorrow because ‘it’s Christmas.’

Guilting people about this and citing ‘canon’ in a deeply misleading manner is not good-faith behavior, even though I don’t imagine it’s being done maliciously either. It will, which is to say it has in very recent memory, create an unhealthy and abusive fandom environment.

And to say ‘those instances of harassment based on takes like mine shouldn’t have happened, but also the fan creators who got harassed out of the fandom over sweaters shouldn’t have done the same thing canon does, because other canon i like better and which is more morally pure’ is just fandom wank.

It’s just fandom wank, and the fact that it involves the representation of a discriminated-against group just raises the stakes and offers the people attempting to pass fandom laws additional ammunition. Which raises the odds of things getting ugly.

It doesn’t change that distorting facts to coerce people into doing what you want is not an appropriate way to behave within a community.

#hoc est meum #batman fandom wank #batfam and christmas #religion #fandom wank #what is canon #bullshit that's what #but if you're going to use it to try to make other people conform to your desires #AT LEAST be up-front about how large a slice of the nonsense you're actually leveraging

20 notes · View notes