dovemitri

[dovemitri]

This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol​ said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:

Holy shit, 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.

Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.

You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.

When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.

Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping. 

Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.

Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.

A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.

As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.

And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)

But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.

Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.

That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.

Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”

My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.

Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers. 

Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.

It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.

[dovemitri]

This is a result of the inhumane decisions that members of this administration want you to be silent about in public for fear of a loss of “civility”.

[dovemitri]

[dovemitri]

[dovemitri]

Reminder that twitter is now an informal, unregulated (i.e. warrantless) information source for Trump administration use.

[dovemitri]

Is it jusft me or should like... Should people with sex lives/kinks/NSFW thoughts also be allowed to look at stims without being treated like creeps... idk I feel like there's a major infantalization issue in the stimboard community even though people say they aren't infantalizing they'll turn right around and say "if youve ever posted anything NSFW I will be grossed out if you like the stims I post and block you"

Like yeah it's very good and healthy to block ppl you're uncomfortable with, but that's when they come at you, that's when they come to you and make you uncomfortable/you happen to come across them and think you should go ahead and block to avoid them. If you are actively stalking and snooping to find someone's kink that is legit sexual harassment.

Like when did it become normal to interact with every single person that interacts with your blog, I want to be able to like things without feeling like op is going to fucking stalk my blog Every Single Time to check all my posts and see if their opinions align with mine. Just be normal with the fact that people exist differently than you.

[dovemitri]

i don't care how uncomfortable you are around cis men, queer cis men still need places to go, and sometimes, those spaces will be shared with yours. disabled and neurodivergent queer men and queer men of color especially need a place to go. the queer community isn't the "fuck cis men" community. that is the rad fem community. if you think cis men and people who read as cis men are inherently "too scary" or shouldn't be allowed in queer spaces, you joined the wrong community.

[dovemitri]

Tbh I think fandom generally needs to get better at sitting with the uncomfortable fact that a story/fanwork/meme/whatever can hurt one person and help another

[dovemitri]

i feel like the plot has really been lost in the conversation about sexualizing underage characters in anime.

one of the points that the anon who sent me that big bulleted list made about frieren is that "the female character designs are clearly lolibait and evoke the ‘1000 year old elf who looks very young’ trope" and yeah, clearly frieren is evoking the ancient elf who looks young trope just by being a literal direct example of that thing, but i'm not really sure in what way her design could be considered lolibait?

she's pretty short and flat chested but other than that the only part of this character design that's meaningfully childish is the pigtails. it's not exactly a design that's made to show off how relatively young she looks, nor is it a design that seems geared to be sexually appealing in its own right. and it's especially not a design that's designed to be sexually appealing because the character looks young. every inch of skin between the toes and neck are covered, and the only place anything is visibly form fitting is on her knees and calves. the rest has some pretty voluminous drapery going on.

in general a lot of people are pretty weird about anime character designs. like you've got whatshername from bocchi the rock. the red one with the guitar. i havent seen it hold on let me google her.

this lady. she's 25? i think. anyway obviously she reads as 'young' but also to the best of my knowledge everyone in bocchi the rock just kind of looks like this because thats how the artist draws people. is this lolibait? i've certainly seen people imply that character designs like this one are part of 'pedophilia culture' but to me that's just kind of scaremongering bullshit

i feel like it's just kind of an insidious thing to say. like ultimately at the end of the day, do either of these fictional characters resemble a real human child? no. they look like Cartoon Characters.

when adult characters that have faces stylized in the typical 'anime' fashion also have curvy builds and big busts, people will call it creepy because they're of the opinion that you're sticking a child's face onto an adult body and that's degenerate pervert behavior. then on the flipside, if they have straight figures and small busts it's also degenerate pervert behavior because the artist is CLEARLY just trying to draw a child and claim it's an adult.

so like what's the conclusion to be drawn here other than that there's a certain kind of stylization that is just automatcally interpreted as Pedophile Proportions. i really feel like acting like this stuff is a gateway drug to pedophilia is acting like fursuits are a gateway to sexually abusing animals.

[dovemitri]

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[dovemitri]

heyyyyyy girlies just a reminder that ao3 is by proshitters, for proshitters and your puritanical anti rhetoric isn’t welcome there byeeeeeee ship and let ship forever 🫶

(This is from the official AO3 TOS update btw)

[dovemitri]

I'm mostly going to be focusing on staying spiteful and hopeful today but since I've already seen a handful of posts that are like this I do wanna remind everyone that we are dealing with a major surge in radical feminist ideology in queer and progressive spaces, and while I won't fault anyone for venting, now more than ever it is important to familiarize yourself with what radical feminisim is(it is not just hating trans people or trans women it is SO much more and anyone who pretends otherwise is misinformed or intentionally lying) and why it's so dangerous and figure out how to talk about the way the alt-right is targeting young (mostly)white men without getting radfem-y about it.

Don't call them "males" don't act like men are born with misogyny built into their DNA do NOT fucking act like trans men are the enemy and don't spread hopeless bullshit about how men can never improve or will always hate women and thus are a lost cause and the only people we'll ever be safe around are women and queer men who abandon masculinity completely. In the coming years queer, intersex, marginalized, and even some cishet white men will be your allies, they are not a lost cause, they can be swayed to our side, and acting like it's impossible for men to change UPHOLDS the very system that is indoctrinating them right now, it does NOTHING to fight it.

Fr check this at the door now. Radical feminism is inherently racist, sexist, transphobic, classist, and white supremacist and it will NOT save us. I don't care if the person selling you on it is trans or queer or a person of color, radical feminisim is never truly inclusive and WILL NOT SAVE US. Gender and bio essentialism are the tools of the enemy, we do not need them. Abandon them now and purge them from your theory, community, and self.

Solidarity will save us. Radical feminism will only divide and destroy.

[dovemitri]

people need to have higher standards for what being “pro-trans” means

[dovemitri]

there is not a secret woke and just version of sexual surveillance & perversion hysteria that you can uncover by meticulously tweaking the demographics of your targets

[dovemitri]

queer people on this site really make me feel like a confused straight guy at pride. the discourse here could kill a man

[dovemitri]

"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.

"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

[dovemitri]

DNI lists on this website are fucking insane