#AND NOW victims are being sexualized.
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and if it wasn't clear enough - FUCK ryan murphy <3
#they speak#i am once again getting riled up ab the menendez brothers show#i too love the dimes dimes dimes mfing dimes tiktok audio#but nicholas chavez makes my skin crawl <3#and also!!!#stop making shows about victims you piece of shit <333#especially considering they were so so so misrepresented#imagine going through trauma and having someone rip through it in front of millions#AND NOW victims are being sexualized.#where is the line for nefarious intent.#cooper koch can get a little kiss on the forehead for actually caring about them though
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i like how barton went from being like... a hippie in terms of how he viewed sex in his early twenties, then kind of abstained from it for a few years / became sexually repressed, which... definitely isn't such a good thing. BUT then he became even more of a freak (and i do mean that in the good way this time LOL) around the time he started residency because WOW is that shit stressful. though that was also unfortunately around the time when he really started to spiral as well 😬 but we don't need to talk about that ahahhh
like the way this man learned how to express his sexuality REALLY came full circle in the end considering he was like 'yeah, back in the early days that i was in college, i was a freak. but now i'm not anymore... though do you want to see me do it again anyway?' like 💀 JSJSJ if he weren't so demented, i'd almost be inclined to say good for him, y'all LMAO feeling comfortable with your sexuality and perhaps even having a bit of fun with it (though maybe too much in barton's case, because he literally weaponizes it in order to lure in his victims. BUT once again, we don't need to talk about that right now psshhh. i actually fully intend on talking about that in the tags NGL) is more often than not a good thing after all
#OF MONSTERS AND MEN: musings.#nah but although i haven't really mentioned this before... when i first developed barton he had ALWAYS been kind of sexually repressed-#because he was sort of brought up by wesley to believe that it was one of those 'taboo' topics to the point where he had to get the talk-#from winslow and i'm not gonna lie i kind of find that WILD now LMAO because i mean like i said here a big part of how barton lures-#people in to eventually become his victims is through flirting with them and going on dates with them.#so like whenever i think about it now it didn't really make sense for barton to view sex as this 'hush-hush' topic bc he quite literally-#uses his sexuality to his advantage as i said here / weaponizes it. though expressing your sexuality isn't bad in and of itself OFC#the way in which he goes about doing it personally is just. Wellll not so good for lack of better words JSJSJ because barton is-#a serial killer whom has actually been sensationalized in the news (bc y'all know how terrible the news is when it comes to this stuff)-#into being called the 'heartbreak killer' because barton manipulates people and basically says exactly what they want to hear as well-#as makes himself as physically attractive as possible to voluntarily get his victims to come with him which is. yeahhh YIKES#but i can imagine that as soon as the news found out for the first time that his victim had last been reported to be going on a date-#with someone that they latched onto that and made it into a story that lacks the seriousness that something like that should-#always be treated with TBH because although they are just characters whenever it comes to the scope of their world they aren't and-#are living people so??? it's TOTALLY wack to be exploiting people like that to get views especially in a place like gotham where-#there's already enough craziness as it is without giving a serial killer a name that basically equates the murders to 'heartbreaks'-#which are definitely not on the same level at ALL but anyhow. i'm rambling now SKSKS#this isn't to say that barton always uses his sexuality to fulfill bad objectives bc like i said it isn't bad in and of itself -#though the fact that he does says something about him as a person since it's a rather sensitive thing for a lot of people you know?#and making people feel like they're wanted? when in actuality you just?? want to kill them??? it is severely messed up so yeahhh#tw: manipulation#tw: sex mention#tw: barton just being an asshole tbh
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everyone saying some shit about "maybe it's the macdennis brainrot, but--" about the bryan/aaron mac/dennis parallels. i promise it's not you reading too far into things, it was 100% intentional. and i'm not saying this as a "brain rotted shipper" i'm saying this as the bitch who has been yelling BECAUSE of the "brain rotted shippers" for the past week and a half.
#that was the entire point of the episode u guys#my fear is that now with this revelation everyone will lean into 'evil mac' too far like they have been with dennis but#yes. dennis has the victim here for a While. thats what ive been saying shsjfbfjjdks#and i dont think mac is *entirely* aware. i think he does things selfishly and ends up hurting den#but once again. he has been sexually assaulting dennis for SEASONS.#they both hurt each other#mac plays dumb but does everything he wants to do regardless#dennis thinks he's in control but in reality is the one being harassed and manipulated#its been like this for a fucking while#im just glad we have confirmation that mac's knowingly doing it now#ada speaks
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We talk about how Dany's ending in Midsommer us not a happy one. She's in a cult, they'll kill her when she gets old, she murder others.
But I don't see talk about Dany participating in the making ritual. Dany will lead young girls to mate with older men. Maybe she'll go out and recruit those men or even lonely young blond girls that lost their families. And she'll be in that room. During the mating.
Dany came from a world where grown men sleeping with 15 year old girls is considered disgusting and rape. Now she'll be encouraging it.
#Midsommer#Ari aster#Horror#Dany is going to be a victim become abuser#And a pretty bad one#This is not an empowering film#Because Dany will be sexually abusing young girls#And why does everyone confidently forget about Simon and Connie?#The other guys were being Jackasses at times#Not that it means they deserve their deaths#But Simon and Connie did absolutely nothing wrong#They were POC#They weren't leaving alive no matter how well they behaved#They women in the mating room were also responsible for those rapes#And Dany will participate now that she is a full member of the cult
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I need help with something my fellow FFXIV players, I'm not sure how active the fandom is on here, but it can't hurt to try.
I need a new retainer because my other 3 are almost full along with my glamour dresser, and this is without hats thanks to this game hating hats on viera🙃. I can't decide what to make my next retainer, these are the 3 choices I've come down to.
I only have one Viera and I like Viera, but the other two are Au Ra and Roegadyn, so I thought maybe I should add a Miqo'te. I couldn't decide on the hair colour but the pink looks nice and would add to a joke I'll explain next paragraph and the reason to why I added screenshots of my warrior of light and the Viera retainer.
I added these screenshots because of this joke head canon I have of my retainer and warrior of light. I wasn't paying attention to the dialogue when choosing a personality and somehow I made an accidental wife for my warrior of light, haha. The other two retainers don't talk like that, haha.
Now the reason why the pink hair would be funny is because blue hair and purple hair, then adding pink hair would make up the bisexual flag colours. So hey, why not make it a polycule of bisexuals since we have a love of love to give, haha🩷💜💙 (not making fun of polyamorous people, I support you👍🏼). I'm just not sure to continue on theme with Viera or change it up, plus that black hair really looks nice. This retainer will be warrior class.
Miqo'te - black hair?
Miqo'te - pink hair?
Viera?
#Final Fantasy XIV#Final Fantasy 14#ffxiv#ff12#warrior of light#now i have to put this here but biphobes and people who hate on polyamorous can stay the fuck away#i'm not polyamorous but i took time to educate myself about it#but i am bisexual and there has been so much biphobia this year and some really disgusting shit said especially about bi women#my spaces are safe for all LGBTQIA people and the way a lot of you within the community treat fellow queers is disappointing#there is a difference between jokes and being a vile arsehole#joking about bisexuals sucking at choices like i am now is funny#saying that we are filthy whores that spread diseases and that our sexuality isn't real and only an excuse to cheat isn't funny#i expect that shit from the bigots who want us all dead not from fellow people who are victims of them#play nice or you are blocked#jacquiarno's screenshots#jacquiarno#i tried to add a poll but it wouldn't work
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*grabbing young queer people by the shoulders* listen to me. radical feminism is inherently transphobic. you cannot rehabilitate it or reclaim it or make it trans inclusive, I don't care what the people on twitter who claim to be authorities on queerness say. the foundation of radical feminism is nothing but bio and gender essentialism and biphobia and aphobia and anti-kink rhetoric and intersexism and yes, misogyny. it does not offer a future, not for bi people, aroace people, sex workers, not for kinksters, or intersex people, cis women, or trans people regardless of gender and you should care about those people. it will never result in queer liberation because it is an ideology of exclusion and hatred. you gain nothing by buying into the idea that half the population is evil by birth or by transition. you gain nothing by acting like women are perpetual victims who can't think for themselves and are tainted by their association with men. being a man or being attracted to them is not a sin. if we truly want to stand a chance of dismantling the patriarchy we actually NEED men on our side especially marginalized men. they are our allies.
the problem with terfs is not just transphobia, it never was, the radical feminism is also so unbelievably harmful. you cannot save it and it will not save you, stop drawing lines between queer people and join hands with them instead. remove people who are actually harmful, not innocent people who happen to have the wrong sexuality or gender or job. we get there together or we don't get there at all. we need each other now more than ever. do not listen to those who seek to divide us even if they are queer. we all deserve so much better than the hell radical feminism pretends is a liberated future.
I do not blame anyone who fell prey to this rhetoric, I know it feels good to have a common enemy and lash out at those you think are siding with them however they do it, but men, especially marginalized men, are not your enemies. and it's never too late to realize that and change for the better.
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sorry men it turns out i might not be a wanted man
#and i will keep waking up everyday#I'm upset that I'll never see my parents again because my stupid brother says he didn't sexually assault me#now i know they want to keep their favourite investment living in their house. they like him. he's got a good job. he went to uni.#there isn't enough space in their family for a man who sexually assaulted his sister and the man who used to be that sister.#a community or sphere which support abusers will drive away victims by enacting further abuse on them#the house i grew up in was a sphere like that#and now i cut them all off. they don't get to meet my friends. i can never send a cool weird song to my dad again.#I'm never going to watch the sunrise from my old bedroom window ever again#I'll never see the cats again. the last time they saw me they were scared. i wish i could've kissed them once more#it wasn't like i spoke to my family very often after i moved out and before all this. i kept a lot of it to myself.#i have a life without them. a nice life i think. i don't regret standing up for myself and talking about the assault#and I'm doing nothing wrong by telling people what a massive piece of shit my brother is and for demanding answers from him#I lost a lot of things in the process#i was sorting through all my life possessions for two weeks straight and barely kept any of it#like including school books from childhood. most of them binned. if i don't need it I'm not leaving it for my mum to faun over#she hates me. hates hates. her eyes are mean#she hates me as if I'm some daughter who cheated by being a man.#but I'm out now. it's over. my life begins. i hope i don't get sick. i worry about money.#i was gonna say i worry about being cringe in a city where reputation matters but like. IM NOT POSTING IRL DRAMA ON REDDIT. I THINK I'M OK
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just rewatched half of Home Invasion and god. I am obsessed with Steven Wilson but in such a weirdly specific way vs other musicians?? like obviously I adore his music and his songwriting totally resonates with me but also, without being weird about it I’m, like, obsessed with him as a… physical being? completely nonsexually (being ace and all) but man I have never wanted to give someone a HUG so BADLY. also the way he never wears shoes and is so casual onstage? like, he looks like he could be sitting on the sofa, not a made-up RockstarTM. I’m just here like 🥺🥺 and then there’s his mannerisms/gesticulations which are just fascinating to me. idk basically I’m aesthetically/sensually as well as musically insane about this guy lol. can’t wait for the new album and to actually see him in person next year!!
#he’s a victim of that thing where you get into an artist. and they are completely normal/average looking#then you get obsessed and they become weirdly attractive#like aesthetic/musical demisexuality lol#i am sooo into him but it feels weird bc the intensity is. like. sexual. LMAO#and it totally isn’t. again me being ace and all#(sidenote i’m feeling more confident/less imposterish in saying that now!)#i watch that concert vid and i’m just. vibrating. with some kinda pure serotonin from him just like sitting there#cause i’m clearly very normal about him and his music LMAO#this post is an attempt to remove some of that energy so i can sleep 🤣#i love being able to interact with my favourite musicians in a completely sane way yall :)#dustnroses.txt#someone tell me you know what i mean and i don’t just sound like an obsessive psycho lol#i’m like this with others to an extent (most notably mikael åkerfeldt- go figure) but my brain totally latched onto steven for some reason#most other ppl i’m just like you make cool music ily! and that’s the end of it#with varying levels of aesthetic attraction#ok i’ll shut up now i think i’ve embarrassed myself enough
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reddit is so fucking weird. you'll say something completely sane like "there is a problem with adults acting predatory towards children, like countdowns until child actors turn 18 for example. I have experienced this type of behaviour myself & towards my friends & it has negatively effected us" & they'll downvote you to oblivion & tell you actually it's normal to act like that around children & only within the last few years has The Woke Puritans made this a bad thing. like ah okay these people are just straight up pedophiles & would probably call me slurs if they had any more information about me. i see.
#it was a bunch of harry potter fans but i only realized that after. wish i knew beforehand so i could've just blocked & moved on#im also so not used to swearing being rude on other sites. people keep telling me to not swear & im like#are we in kindergarten? are you a child afraid of the word fuck? is this what we're doing now#why are people so weird about sexualizing kids. & why do they always ignore victims of CSA#actually that's not true. they don't ignore victims. they attack them on site & call them puritans#to be fair i also see this shit on tumblr but people here usually try to disguise it as a shipping only issue#on reddit they just straight up admit they sexualize children. with almost no prompting either they'll just tell you that
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A grown ass man lured a 14 year old girl out to a park at night, abused her, killed her, dismembered her and scattered her remains in public parks and rivers. Now if that girl was a cisgender girl, the general public would rightfully put the blame on the perpetrator for taking advantage of and murdering a minor.
But because Pauly Likens Jr was a transgender girl, the general public is going full trans panic defense, even though the perpetrator said they met on Grindr, if that was even true. Grindr doesn’t verify the age of its users and legally doesn’t have to due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which means half of sexually active queer adolescents will use this app and fall into the hands of predators.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/national/2021-07-12/unseen-part-3-popular-gay-dating-app-grindr-poses-exploitation-risk-to-minors
Grindr has been known to have a sexual exploitation of minors issue, and I just know that people are going to see that Pauly Likens Jr and her killer may have used this app to blame Pauly for her own demise.
It’s just like they did with Gwen Araujo in 2002 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by 4 grown ass men), Mercedes Williamson in 2015 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by a grown ass man) and Nikki Kuhnhausen in 2019 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by a grown ass man). You stop being an innocent kid who is capable of being victimized when you’re trans. You’re a threat to other kids your age or younger, and you’re a precocious sexual provocateur towards adults. This applies especially to transgender girls - complete dehumanization and transmisogyny.
This pattern of transgender teenage girls being taken advantage of by adults and killed is completely unacceptable, and society should start acting like it.
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i’m in such disbelief right now and beyond disgusted.
i really hope y’all are choosing your morals over kpop; because we do not know these men at all. i will never side with or defend a predator and a criminal, even with little to no proof. even if there is the smallest chance he may be innocent, i will always believe the victim first.
some of you, as fans of the boys for years and him in general, i know you must be feeling disappointed and betrayed. you’re not dumb for previously supporting him, as we couldn’t have possibly known. but now is the time for a reality check and it’s time to wake up and take a step back. this just goes to show that we know absolutely nothing about them.
for sm to just outright put out a statement on their own before any rumors even surfaced and immediately kick him out? this has to be insanely serious and i’m terrified of what he could’ve done. the crazy thing is with everything currently happening in korea with the telegram situation, and korean women constantly being in danger in general because of the men there, i’m not at all surprised that celebrities are being exposed. sm has protected criminals before, and held onto lucas when his scandal came out as well as other artists who have been exposed for similar crimes. i can’t even imagine the severity of the current situation. we’ve seen what happened with the burning sun, and these men are not immune to being misogynistic, vile human beings.
members have already unfollowed him and deleted posts with him in them; his best friend of 17yrs has unfollowed him. the company taking the initiative and him getting kicked out of the group in less than a second before anything even came out, no denying the claims or even trying to defend him. that should be enough to tell you and understand how serious this actually is. i am beyond disgusted with him and this whole situation.
i sincerely hope the victim is doing okay and praying for them to heal and get the justice they deserve. and remember that your love for these celebrities should always be conditional, because we do not know them. it’s their job to put on a show and show you their public persona, but behind closed doors? we don’t know what they’re actually like. we put them on a pedestal and yet we don’t know what they’re really capable of. they are still men after all. i hope the police are taking this seriously. there needs to be consequences and these women need to be protected.
let this be a lesson to all of us. they don’t know us, and we don’t know them, not really, not at all.
ALWAYS choose morals over these strangers you idolize. and as women, we should be standing with the victims.
maybe not all men, but enough of them. and maybe not all men, but somehow always a man. and going forward, i will continue to support nct as a whole with the remaining members. however, keeping the situation in mind, i will be supporting from afar for a little while. if the situation escalates and other members are investigated and new information comes to light about the rest of them either knowing or possibly being involved, it would be best to step away for good. i will do my best to stay updated. but i do hope the rest of the members are doing okay, and hopefully no other members were involved; but this, just shows that they can always surprise us. you never think it’ll be your fave, until it is.
let’s hope this causes a domino effect and more of these people are exposed and charged for the crimes they’re committing.
sending love to anyone who has ever experienced sexual violence or has been targeted and been in a similar situation. it is not your fault and it never was!
love you all and my dms are always open if you need to vent. <3
❗️EDIT: also i wanna add that we need to not praise the rest of the members or any other celebrity for simply unfollowing him on social media. that is the least of anyone’s worries.
we don’t know if they were aware, we don’t know if they knew and were protecting him or turning a blind eye. it could be them trying to save themselves and clear their guilty conscience. maybe they didn’t know and are just as shocked as we are, we don’t know that either.
we blindly trust these people and believe they have good intentions but look at where that can lead to. fans being upset is valid, yes; but remember people with money and power will do whatever it takes to sweep things under the rug and make it go away in order to save face and keep their image and reputation.
follow-up post here.
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So I've seen a few too many people on twitter talking about The Kiss Scene from the new Scott Pilgrim anime. People saying it's fetishistic and indulgent, people calling it male gazey, etc. And while the kiss itself is certainly a bit exaggerated, I felt like writing a bit about why I disagree, and why context is important, like it always is. But it basically turned into an extended analysis on the metatextual treatment of Roxie Richter. So bear with me. It's a long post.
What really matters about this scene is not the kiss itself, but what precedes it. Not even just the fight scene just before it, but what precedes the whole anime series, really. And that's the Scott Pilgrim comic book, and the live action movie. Because in both, Roxie is a punchline.
She's a joke. Her character starts and ends with "one of the exes is actually a girl, I bet you didn't expect that." Jokes are made about Ramona's latent bisexuality, the movie especially treating it as funny and absurd, and her validity as a romantic interest is entirely written off by Ramona as being "just a phase." There's a fight scene, she's defeated by a man giving her an orgasm which implicitly calls her sexuality into question (come on), and the movie just moves on. It sucks. It really, really sucks.
The comic fares a little better. It never veers into outright homophobia like the movie does, and while the line about Ramona having gone through a phase remains, Roxie actually gets one over on Scott when Ramona briefly gets back with Roxie. But Roxie is still only barely a character. Like all the other evil exes, she's just a stepping stone towards the male protagonist's development. She barely even gets any screentime before she's defeated by Scott's "power of love." But Roxie stands out, since she's the only villain who is queer, or at least had been confirmed queer at that point (hi Todd). In a series that champions multiple gay men in the supporting cast, the single undeniable lesbian in the story is a villain. She's labeled as evil, made fun of, pushed aside in favor of the men, and then discarded. Her screentime was never about her, or her feelings for Ramona. It was about the straight, male protagonist needing to overcome her. And that was Roxie Richter. An unfortunate victim of the 2010s.
Fast forward to current year, and the new anime series is announced. Everybody sits down to watch the new series expecting another retelling of the same story, and.... hang on, that straight male protagonist I mentioned just died in the first episode. And now it's humanizing the villains from the original story. And there's Roxie, introduced alongside the other evil exes in the second episode, and she's being played entirely straight, without a punchline in sight. No jokes are made about her gender, no questions are made of her validity as one of Ramona's romantic interests. The narrative considers her important. In one episode, she already gets more respect than she did in either of the previous iterations of Scott Pilgrim. And this isn't even her focus episode yet... which happens to be the very next one.
The anime series goes to great lengths to flesh out the original story's villains and to have Ramona reconcile with them. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Roxie gets to go first. While Matthew Patel gets his development in episode 2, Roxie is the first to directly confront Ramona, now our main protagonist. This is notable too because it's the only time the exes are encountered out of order. Roxie is supposed to be number 4, but she's first in line, and later on you realize that she's the only one who's out of sequence. She's the one who sets the precedent for the villains being redeemed. She's the most important character for Ramona to reconcile with.
What follows is probably the most extensive, elaborate 1 on 1 fight scene in the whole show. Roxie fights like a wounded animal, her motions are desperate and pained. Ramona can only barely fight back against her onslaught. Different set-pieces fly by at breakneck speed as Roxie relentlessly lays her feelings at Ramona's feet through her attacks and her distraught shouts. And unlike the comic or the movie, Ramona acknowledges them, and sincerely apologizes. And the two end up just laying there, exhausted, reminiscing about when they were together.
Only after this, after all of this, does the kiss scene happen. Roxie has been vindicated, she has reconciled with the person who hurt her, the narrative has deemed that her anger is justified and has redeemed her character. And she gets her victory lap by making the nearest other hot girl question her heterosexuality, sharing a sloppy kiss with her as the music triumphantly crescendos.
It's... a little self-congratulatory, honestly. But it's good. It's redemption for a character who had been mistreated for over a decade. And she punctuates the moment by being very, very gay where everyone can see it, no men anywhere in sight. Because this is her moment. And then she leaves the plot, on her own accord this time, while humming the hampster dance. What a legend. How could anything be wrong with this.
#scott pilgrim#spto#scott pilgrim takes off#roxie richter#roxanne richter#scott pilgrim spoilers#spto spoilers
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In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.
Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?
Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.
More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.
But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.
A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.
Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.
So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.
Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.
It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.
There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:
The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”
A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.
It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.
And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.
Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.
Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.
So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.
Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.
So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.
And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.
And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.
And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.
Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.
Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).
It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.
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idc what your reason is for calling yourself a zionist rn i think its unhelpful, kinda cringe, and you trying to be counter culture in a time where doing so kinda just makes people assume you're a fascist.
#i'm sorry. i'll say it. i have to apparently. since ppl want me to use my voice so badly. fine. ill speak it.#but dont expect me to weigh on your side or someone elses side more than the other ok#im on the side of peace and not wanting ppl to be killed and ceasefire and work on a two state resolution or something#along those lines so jewish ppl DONT get shoved out BUT neither do palestinians.#im also on the side of fuck netanyahu and fuck hamas.#whats my solution? you're gonna ask internet user snekdood what he thinks we should do about the i/p conflict?#the guy whos disabled and cant drive and whos disliked by a lot of people online (for fake and/or dumb reasons. but i digress)?#about what we should do??#bitch im struggling to figure out if i deserve to live still why in tf do you think i would have any of this external-to-me shit figured ou#i literally got sexually assaulted a couple days ago wtf do you want me to do about it fuck off#not that anyone will believe me because hashtag believe victims is conditional now 😒😒😒😒😒#conditions being: it has to be someone i like whos the victim or someone i really dislike being accused#seems applicable to this situation rn also donnit 😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒
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