Okay.
I was mad about S2E8, but the fan response has me worried. I'm seeing people being very uncharitable towards each other and the creators. The fandom infighting I can live with. That's fandom for you. But I am concerned about how this could impact the creators. Rant incoming, be ye warned.
First and foremost, I hope the entire creative team behind OFMD turns off their internet for a while. I'm sure they're getting absolutely mobbed right now, and they don't deserve it. I want to trust them to understand how the internet works and tune out, because this is the kind of shit that damages people. I'm genuinely scared for them.
We have got to stop making it dangerous to tell Queer stories. It's hard not to lash out when something hurts, and the internet makes lashing out so easy to do. It hurts like hell when you (reluctantly) trust a creator, and they disappoint you. But I can't think of a Queer show or creator that hasn't faced online harassment from the Queer community, and that is fucking tragic.
I didn't like S2E8. I thought it was poorly executed, especially compared to the astonishingly high-quality writing in the rest of the show. But just because I didn't think it was good, doesn't mean it has to be evil. And frankly, I hope no one involved with the show ever sees my criticism of it. As a writer, I know what kind of feedback helps, and what just hurts. My venting and analysis isn't for them, it's for me and my fellow pirate enjoyers. My feelings have a place, and DJenkins' inbox is not it. Telling a story I personally disliked is not a crime. There should be no punishment for doing it.
I trusted the OFMD team to tell a good story. That trust has taken a dent or two, because a character I cared for died in a way that was, to my mind, trite, forced, unsatisfying, and unkind. That was disappointing. I am disappointed. I can live with that. But if the creators suffer for telling Queer stories, that would be unfathomably worse. And if that scares people off from telling Queer stories in future? That would be heartbreaking.
I wish I could rage and froth about the stories I care about without worrying about collateral damage. And if those stories weren't about marginalized people, I could. That's the kicker. That's the double standard. People who create and consume status-quo-ass-kissing media don't have to worry so much about this shit. Their icons can commit terrible real-world crimes and sell memoirs about it. Mine can't even make a divisive narrative choice without getting loudly condemned straight to super-hell.
TL:DR Creators of Queer stories get held to impossible standards. Please leave DJenkins and the team alone. Online harassment = bad.
(Note: Edited for more clarity and less sensationalizing language.)
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my new years resolution is that if i see a long discourse-looking post im just scrolling past it. im so completely sick of seeing these long paragraphs of “we have to stop doing this” or “stop misusing this word” or “if you do this you suck” or whatever. were never going to get anywhere with it. i am on this website to see art of my favorite little guys, not pick apart every thing people say and do. idc if the post aligns with my beliefs or not. i will just scroll past it. dont be afraid to do this too
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Sometimes, to torture myself, I look at old discourse posts, and then I find out that some of the ace discourse blogs are still active in 20fucking22. Except now they’re panphobic and transandrophobic
I love how they say “terfs dni” but they engage in terf rhetoric. terfs themselves admitted that ace exclusion is the first step towards becoming a terf. They sometimes call pansexual people a slur based on the T slur. also, gendercrits call trans people “the gender fandom.” acephobes and panphobes always say “the asexual fandom” and “the pansexual fandom,” and transandrophobia deniers call transmascs “the transandrophobia fandom.” I know y’all wanna call us trenders so bad.
You are legally allowed to make fun of people who got into ace discourse in 2017 and are somehow still around in 2022. It’s morally correct.
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I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.
i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.
i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.
nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.
the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.
what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.
that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.
but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.
i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.
the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.
if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.
even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.
children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.
which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.
individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.
if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.
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Human Rights Campaign must not be where you get your morality from. They have a long history of bad behavior - bother internally and externally - and they're pretty much the last queer advocacy org I'd trust when it comes to who they do and don't support. Instead of watching things on Disney+, the programming should be pirated and then not discussed at all on social media. It's really not that hard! I do it all the time, and I haven't run out of stuff to talk about.
Thank you for your response. You’re doubtless cool.
They (Human Rights Campaign) do seem to have done bad things in the past. Definitely. But h+ave they, maybe, done things to make up for it since then?* Like they have ‘lobbied’ to oppose the existence of DADT. They opposed some of the weird transphobic sports stuff in Florida last year, I think. Florida is, the relevance of this stuff, I guess... If they now think Disney has moved on from their evil support of ‘Don’t Say Gay’, and they are taking money from Disney to oppose that bill, that is just enough to limitedly use Disney+ (in the cost-relevant-context mentioned earlier / in my earlier post).
* I should be careful to know that at the least there is a limit to how bad an original ‘misdeed’ is before no amount of good deed can ‘cancel it out’. I am not the first to think this.
Furthermore, it seems that despite their previous (and valid) concerns about HRC, PrideAtWork now allies themselves to them, at least partially. (Source: PrideATwork article about HRC’s suspension of Walmart)
It should be noted that I do priate/stream/whatever Disney cartoons (cartoons are my favourite Disney stuff) – e.g. TOH and Amphibia. I do <3 The Owl House. I do a lot of cartoon watching via wcosThingy. For some reason I feel I, like, ‘can’t’ stream stuff that isn’t cartoons. I know that’s illogical. Sorry.
I don’t discuss much Disney stuff on tumblr. For my last 10 posts (including re-blogs), only 20% of them have been Disney related. (sorry if that’s wrong I’m not too good at mental maths). (Of course this post would change that statistic).
I have been boycotting Disney (+) for months until recently.
The above has been my attempt to explain my stance on the issue. I will probably boycott D+ again at some point in the future, at least temporarily.-
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